Feb
26
2010
Most Listened to Artists
Author: supsonI got to talking with some of my fellow Olympic-techies on a shift the other day about what artist each of us thought we had listened to the most all time.
I provided a few hypotheses on my top results, but not wanting to leave such critical matters to mere chance and speculation I let the data do the talking. Specifically, my coveted iTunes listening history data.
I need to diverge here for a moment. Anyone who has ever purchased a new computer and “migrated” their music library to a new iTunes instance knows that although much of your “tagging” comes over, your “date added”, “play count” and other critical fields are reset. Now, to the average person (i.e. 99% of people) this is probably fine since all of your genres, ratings and playlists are intact – hooray! But to a geek like me, I would consider this a disastrous loss of years worth of “filed research” on my music listening behaviour and patterns. And I’ve got over 6 years worth of listening history accumulated! Curious fact: the first song added to my vast library was “Weeds” by Pulp, May 5/04. See? Without all that juicy data, how would I have been able to know that!
Enough of that diatribe – onto the results. I’ve included the Top 10 here, as well as the total number of play counts. For a more complete list of the Top 60 you can see the full posting here. I’m interested to hear results from anyone else’s library!
10. U2 (766)
9. The Jesus & Mary Chain (796)
8. Cake (859)
7. Nine Inch Nails (864)
6. Stereophonics (916)
5. Kasabian (1026)
4. Oasis (1047)
3. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (1205)
2. New Order (1271)
1. The Charlatans (1652)
For the record, I did guess the top 3 artists correctly, but I’m comforted to know the data supports my hypothesis.
Putting a bit of a twist on things, another way I could have answered this question is to use the sum of all song times and play counts by artist to say “which artist have I spent the most time listening to?” Perhaps a challenge for a future post…
