Lots of artists made their spot because I attended a concert or discovered them this year and got very enthusiastic about listening to this new artist. There are also lots of Spotify scrobbles, but not as many as there would be if work’s firewall didn’t keep scrobbles from being counted.

Artists

1. Anberlin (427 listens)
2. Fall Out boy (239 listens)
3. Jim Guthrie (221 listens)
4. I Fight Dragons (214 listens)
5. Paul and Storm (190 listens) - A nerdy folksy group that I really like. Their irreverence is my kind of fun.
6. The Beatles (136 listens)
7. Anamanaguchi (130 listens)
8. Lionize (130 listens)
9. Five Iron Frenzy (128 listens)
10. Louis Jordan (113 listens)
11. The Protomen (104 listens)
12. Beebs and Her Money Makers (104 listens)
13. Willy Chirino (93 listens)
14. Katy Perry (93 listens)
15. Ignacio Cervantes (92 listens)

Songs

Interestingly, only two new songs made the list this year - Talking Body and Know Yourself. Because I don’t listen to the radio, I discovered these via Spotify. The rest are all older songs that I happened to listen to a lot. And Chandelier came from Danielle getting the album and asking me to play it in the car.

This was not a big quarter for listening to music for me. That’s mostly because Sam and Stella were born and so I didn’t have much ability to listen to music as I needed to be able to hear if they were crying or if someone needed help with them. According to last.fm I went from 1,104 scrobbles in Oct to 288 in November.

1. Beebs and Her Money Makers (94 listens) - one of the songs came up randomly in Amarok which led me to listen through the albums a few times.
2. The Beatles (55 listens)
3. Kenny Clarke (44 listens) - A Fresh Air review of a new collection got me interested in him so I added it to my Spotify tracks. Really fun music.
4. Anberlin (34 listens)
5. DJ Cutman (33 listens) - I don’t know why, but I ended up with a lot of DJ Cutman music on my new phone and since I don’t like to use bandwidth while I’m driving, I’ve listened to it a lot in the car.
6. Ignacio Cervantes (32 listens)
7. Fall Out Boy (29 listens)
8. Danny Elfman (28 listens)
9. Katy Perry (26 listens) - all from Scarlett requests
10. Relent K (25 listens)
11. Five Iron Frenzy (24 listens)
12. Jonathan Geer (19 listens)
13. Vampire Weekend (18 listens) - heard a song so I wanted to re-explore the band. Some of the songs still hit me hard and others have faded.
14. Sergei Prokofiev (17 listens)
15. Anamanaguchi 16 listens)

Stats: Total Songs (in my collection): 16985 (Up from 16088 ) – Mostly from buying CDs with 100 tracks of various classical artists.

After getting to MGMT alphabetically, I tired of going through the list alphabetically. While I have rediscovered some music, I wanted to go back to my auto-playlists which would give me my favorites. I could always get back to going through things alphabetically in the future. One way to accomplish what I wanted was to see which songs don’t have a score - another would be to create a low score playlist I could run every once in a while to see if anything that had scored lowly was now something I wanted to hear.

Concerts are certainly a funny bit of entertainment. When you go see a movie, you are going because you like the director or the actors or the idea sounded interesting. You see that movie and that’s the end of it. The same holds true for Broadway shows or Operas. But when you attended a concert, you have a few opening acts you probably don’t know. This is somewhat alleviated nowadays for the well prepared by a quick trip to Spotify or Youtube. After finally seeing The Protomen during last year’s Warped Tour, I was excited about seeing them in concert. My ticket informed me that I’d also be seeing Cowabunga Pizza Time and Lionize. Of course, the difference between concerts and other forms of entertainment is no accident. Opening bands are limpets on the bodies of larger acts, hoping to gain exposure to the fans of the main act. This works best when the organizer has paired up bands that work well together thematically. But, this is the obvious reason why you never know the time the main act is going on stage.

1. Anberlin (171) - Almost the same number of listens as my top artist last quarter (179 for I Fight Dragons). As usual, I continue to enjoy their music and have grown to appreciate some of the ones I didn’t like before. And some of the older stuff seems trite in comparison. 2. Jim Guthrie (168) - As I’ve mentioned before, his folk song compositions are mostly really enjoyable and I like his work on video games and soundtracks. 3. Paul & Storm (138) - I discovered these guys via John Scalzi. I was hesitant to back the Kickstarter for Ball Pit, but I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it on Spotify. 4. Fall Out Boy (101) - A lot of this is from a few recent road trips in which I didn’t want to use data and happened to have Fall Out Boy already on my phone. Doesn’t mean I don’t like the music. 5. Jonathan Coulton (61) - I’ve said so much about how much I enjoy this over the years. Recently Scarlett’s been asking me to play The Princess Who Saved Herself because I got her the book from Greg Pak’s kickstarter. 6. Louis Jorda n (58) - I like to kick it to Louis Jordan on the weekends when I want something classic. 7. Anamanaguchi (56) - Some of this was from the high of seeing them live. Some of it was just from really enjoying the music no matter what, especially Endless Fantasy. 8. Jack White (54) - Another artist I’ve been listening to a lot of because of Spotify. His album Lazaretto does not do well on 30 second preview on Amazon. But because of Spotify, I want to buy the album. 9. Kanye West (42) - Most of this came from listening to my music alphabetically. 10. Lostprophets (41) - I may hate what the singer was accused of doing, but these songs still mostly rock. 10. Lana Del Rey (41) - Something I can throw on that both my wife and I like 12. Willy Chirino (34) - Most of the listens came from a greatest hits album on Spotify. 13. Buddy Rich (33) - Another album I wasn’t sure I wanted until I listened to it on Spotify. It reminds me a lot of the music in Cowboy Bebop 13. Five Iron Frenzy (33) - Perennial Favorite 15. Thelonious Monk (31) - something else I like to throw on Sunday mornings.

I’ve been a fan of Weird Al for about 17 years. I used to have the Disney special Weird Al Going Home, but unfortunately, I lent it to someone and never got it back. Yet, in all the time, I’d never seen a Weird Al concert live. Finally, Weird Al came to Baltimore as part of his Mandatory Fun Tour and I was able to experience an Al Tour. It was a pretty neat experience. It’s only something like the fourth arena concert I’ve been to (even thought it wasn’t technically in an arena). The last arena concert I went to was Rihanna. Interestingly, Weird Al had WAY more costume changes than she did. He had just about one outfit per song with few exceptions. While he was changing, clips played from nearly every video Weird Al has ever been involved in.

This may not be your thing. I’m pretty sure my wife will hate it, but I think Pogo’s work is a perfect example of why culture needs to be free and with less onerous copyright rules. I’m pretty sure all of this is within fair use, but it would take a legal fight for him (or her) to win rather than just give up to Disney’s (and other studios) army of lawyers.

Originally my first concert of 2015 was going to be a little later in the year, but with Danielle away for the weekend, the email letting me know about a concert in just a few days seemed quite fortuitous. I’d had a couple chances to see Anamanaguchi in concert, but the timing was never right. This time it was perfect - weekend and wife out of town. So I decided to go.