In 2012 I accelerated my trend of listening to new music.  More than ever, I experienced new music via various outlets that provided free music like Jamendo, Rolling Stone, and others.  I discovered some great music that I really, really enjoyed.  Since it mostly consisted of singles, a lot of the new artists I discovered aren’t really represented in the lists here, but it does contribute to lower numbers for the usual artists.

Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)

Recently I was looking at this old post and the screenshots of Amarok 1.4 reminded me of something I loved about that version of Amarok - the stats that would display when you were playing a song - like if you were playing a Five Iron Frenzy song it would tell you your three favorite (or most played) Five Iron Frenzy songs.  That functionality never made it back into the Amarok 2 series.  So when I was looking through the Amarok scripts in the script installer I came across Rating Statistics.  It basically gave me everything I wanted other than being linked to the currently playing song.  It allows you to search your favorite songs based on all kinds of criteria like number of plays, user-assigned rating, or auto-score.  You can also assign some weights to it and get your best songs based on that weighting.  Here are the stats about my library:

This has been the configuration of the top eight artists on last.fm for a very long time.  Only Five Iron Frenzy and Weird Al have traded spots.  Everyone else has been secure in their position for years.  The Beatles might soon overtake Anberlin.  Both of them have a long time to go to unseat Fantastic Plastic Machine.  But the weird thing is how long Andrea Echeverri has been ther.e  I haven’t listened to her in at least three years.  There are two really close artists and a third not too far behind, but it is definitly interesting how quickly the listens fall off.  The 15th position is 300 listens less than Andrea.  We’ll see how things continue to evolve as the time passes and I abandon some artists that I no longer like and listen to others that I’ve newly discovered.

For the first time since I started keeping track The Beatles did NOT make the list!  That’s mostly because I have been acquiring TONS of new music (over one thousand tracks) in this quarter and haven’t really been listening on random as much.  Although my #1 artist doesn’t have as many listens as some other quarters, I think this is the first (or second, at most) time where my #15 artist has more than 20 listens.  There are some great new artists making their debuts on my list and hopefully you can discover some new music to listen to!

I started off this quarter using a smart playlist that only played songs I hadn’t heard in the last quarter in an attempt to listen to even more great music, but Amarok lost my library which clears out the last played field and so I ended up with lots of repeats again.  Oh well!  It’s all great music!

1. Five Iron Frenzy (65 plays) - I continued to listen to some great music from my high school years

This quarter my listens were a bit lower than they would otherwise have been because a lot of time I would have spent in front of the computer was spent with my new daughter. But, as she grew and now spends time in her “baby gym”, I sometimes put on music for her both so that she can hear complex music and for my sanity. There are only so many times I can listen to “itsy bitsy spider”.

So here’s my top listened artists for 2011.  Some of these entries are a surprise and others are expected.  I can’t wait to see how many of these artists are on this list next year.  Well, let’s take a look.

1. The Beatles (492) - No surprises here; the ancestors of nearly all pop and rock in America has been on top every quarter.  So of course they’d top this list.

For the last fourth of the year I continued to listen to my music on random via Amarok’s dynamic playlist.  I set it to only play songs that I liked, but other than that left it up to chance.  For the most part, the only exceptions were when I had exams to take and wanted some non-vocal music or to listen to new songs I’d downloaded from Rolling Stone’s website.  Here’s how the artists fared.

For this Quarter I continued listening to my music in order as I attempted to go through my entire catalog so that Amarok could auto-rate the songs I liked and I could switch to a dynamic, random playlist.  I actually finished going through all my music A-Z (and Japanese characters) - except for songs that didn’t have the Album Artist set.

Through a quirk of the way Amarok is programmed and the sorting I’ve selected, a bunch of artists who had the Album Artist blank did not appear along with the artist.  In other words, if a Kanye West track had an album artist of either Kanye or Various, it would appear under Kanye.  But if that field was blank, it appeared under “various artist” at the top.  It’s a strange quirk and as I go through this final category in Q4, I’m trying to remember to fix as many of those as possible.