Music plays a huge role in my life. If I’m on the computer, my headphones are on, typically with music coursing through the lines up to my ears. I keep the volume setting low—I’m not fully appreciating the music on a conscious level, but I am absorbing it. If a song comes on I don’t care for—which can happen if I’m playing a curated playlist or radio station—it does impact my workflow, I admit, because I’ll take a moment from what I’m doing to advance to the next song or abort the playlist. But it’s also an indication that I am listening to the music, not simply playing tracks.
I’ve always loved stats about music. In my younger days, I had a paid subscription to Billboard, not for a magazine, but for just the weekly charts. I even made my own charts, writing lists of my favorite tracks each week, and then calculating stats on them over time. Way back when, my overall favorite track—and one I still love to this day—was Stuck in the Middle With You by Stealers Wheel. I no longer have the documentation to prove it, but the fact is stuck in my head, so it must be true.
In January, 2007, I learned about this crazy new site called Last.fm. It allowed a person to connect their media player to the site and track their plays. Tracking the plays was (and still is) referred to as scrobbling, while the database record of the play is referred to as a scrobble.
I signed up immediately, and have since striven to play music only on systems and services compatible with scrobbling on Last.fm. I dropped Amazon Music because they’ve done everything they can to make scrobbling impossible for me. I used to be a loyal Amazon customer. Now I avoid them most of the time. I’ve yet to watch the most recent season of The Boys or The Outlaws or any episodes of The Rings of Power. Some day I’ll get a one-month Prime subscription to binge watch stuff. For the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to sell stuff through Amazon, or attempt to. Even that isn’t a good experience. But back to the topic of music—even when I purchase a track from Amazon, it’s next to impossible to get Alexa to play it on the Amazon Echo, and if I do manage it, I can’t scrobble it, so… I don’t buy MP3s from Amazon anymore—for that matter, I don’t buy MP3s from anyone at this point. If I don’t already own it and can’t stream it, then I won’t be listening to it.
Tidal is my current music streaming service of choice, though my Last.fm experience with them still leaves much to be desired. The Chrome browser plugin on my laptop works reasonably well with Tidal, and gets the album name right most of the time, even when playing playlists. I do have to avoid adding tracks to my play queue, or the plugin gets the album name wrong. When I play tracks involving multiple artists, I have to edit the scrobble manually to fix the artist name, but being a Last.fm Pro member, I’m allowed to make the edit whenever, and can check a box to apply my edit automatically to future scrobbles of the same track. I love that Last.fm feature.
Tidal supposedly supports a Last.fm connector, so I shouldn’t need to use a browser plugin, but the Tidal-provided method hasn’t been working lately, skipping every other track, which just isn’t acceptable. Still, I stay with Tidal, because scrobbling the correct album name even when playing playlists is important to me.
Why is getting these stats right so important to me? The melding of mathematics and music is part of who I am and always has been. Some people are crazy about statistics concerning their favorite sports teams and players. I don’t give one hoot about sports statistics. I don’t watch football, baseball, basketball, or any of those modern-day gladiator substitutes. Some people watch the New York Times best seller lists to see who’s at the top and track their favorite authors and novels. That doesn’t excite me—though it might if I had a chance of being on the lists. *grin* I no longer follow the Billboard weekly charts. It all boils down to the fact that my tastes don’t often align with what’s popular. And thus, I turn to Last.fm, to track what I like.
I can’t finish this post without including some stats from the past fifteen years. Here are my most-scrobbled artists, albums, and tracks in the following categories.
Artists
Overall / Solo / Female Solo: Fefe Dobson – 7154 Scrobbles
Group: The Pretty Reckless – 4122 Scrobbles
Duo: The Ting Tings – 3901 Scrobbles
Classic Rock: Heart – 3278 Scrobbles
All-Girl Band: The Donnas – 3206 Scrobbles
Male Solo / Male Country: Waylon Jennings – 2618 Scrobbles
Female Country: Tanya Tucker – 2407 Scrobbles
Japanese: YUKI – 1278 Scrobbles
Korean: 박지윤 (Park Ji Yoon) – 422 Scrobbles
Albums
Overall: Rihanna, Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded – 2554 Scrobbles
Electropop: Grimes, Art Angels – 1793 Scrobbles
Rap: Kid Sister, Ultraviolet – 1390 Scrobbles
Classic Country / Gospel: George Jones, The Gospel Collection – 722 Scrobbles
Classic Rock Compilation: ZZ Top, Greatest Hits – 552 Scrobbles
Classic Rock Studio Album: Heart, Dreamboat Annie – 525 Scrobbles
Japanese: Hitomi, Love Concent – 348 Scrobbles
Korean: 박지윤 (Park Ji Yoon), 성인식 (Coming of Age Ceremony) – 104 Scrobbles
Tracks
Overall: Demi Lovato, Get Back – 1220 Scrobbles
Named After a Beverage: Lana Del Rey, Cola – 462 Scrobbles
Named After a Food: Meg Myers, Lemon Eyes – 439 Scrobbles
Title Containing Parentheses: salem ilese, (L)only Child – 419 Scrobbles
Japanese: Hitomi, Japanese Girl – 283 Scrobbles
See the full video of Japanese Girl on bilibili.com.
Korean: 박지윤 (Park Ji Yoon), 성인식 (Coming of Age Ceremony) – 245 Scrobbles
And last but not least…
Scrobble Number 400,000: Sabrina Claudio, Belong to You (feat. 6LACK)
In Closing
If you’re a Last.fm user or just want to check out my full charts, visit the Last.fm profile for user menslar. Follow me if you’d like me to follow you back. Cheers!