2023 with Last.fm

2024-01-04

If you're not familiar with what Last.fm is, it is basically a website that keeps track of the songs you listen to. I've been scrobbling (their term, not mine) tracks since 2011. I have a lot of data with them (a privacy nightmare) and I don't care because I love the stats!!!

Right off the bat, Last.fm is always more accurate than Spotify. I don't listen to music just on Spotify. I have a local library that I listen to as well and Spotify doesn't keep track of that. With their yearly summary, Last.fm also includes listening in November and December, which Spotify doesn't. Yes, the Spotify-Last.fm connection can be spotty so it is not 100% but I think it all cancels out.

Last.fm switched things up this year and finally implemented a year end summary that's more similar to Spotify Wrapped. Every year I eagerly await the stats but this year I was so curious about how Last.fm would implement it this time around.

Let's dive into it.

The Playback

I have listened to 3,339 artists this year. I'm not sure if that's a lot? Is it? I have no idea what the typical number of artists a person listens to in a year.

Admittedly, the bar graph is a little confusing to me. Each bar represents the number of artists that I listened to each week. But is it unique artists across each week? For example, if I listen to Green Day in Week 10, are they also counted when I listen to them on Week 22? My gut feeling is no.

The lowest point in this graph is around the July-August range. This makes sense to me because I was travelling overseas. I couldn't listen to as much music because I was too busy being a tourist and I didn't come across wi-fi too often. I did download a few Spotify playlists but the selection was pretty limited.

I listened to 5,831 albums this year. Again, is this a lot? I don't really know!

I listened to 9,316 tracks this year. I kinda want to try to hit 10,000 next year. Solely because 9,300 is "only" 700 tracks away from 10,000. It can kinda get dangerous how Last.fm manipulates how I listen to music.

I listened to songs 40,424 times this year. Admittedly, sometimes I play music when I'm sleeping. But I tried really hard to clean up those scrobbles in the latter half of the year. I can't speak for the beginning of the year, though.

This year I listened to 109 days and 3 hours of music. Nice. That's almost 1/3 of the year. Checks out, honestly. I am a music fiend.

I liked what Last.fm did. The graphic is a little simplistic but it was animated and everything. Very cute.

109 days and 3 hours of music translates to 1746 cassette tapes. Have kids these days even seen a cassette tape in real life? This was a cute tidbit but it's hard to visualize. Maybe CDs would land with my generation better. Or go a bit more universal and use vinyls instead, since those have made a comeback.

If I needed to commute to moon 34 times, I have a very long playlist I could listen to on my way there and back. This is a cool stat! Apparently it would take less than 80 hours to travel to the moon. I'd probably be sleeping for most of that, hah.

I am the top 55th listener of the band Protest the Hero. I'm surprised I didn't rank higher for anyone else. But I will take it. I saw Protest the Hero in concert this year and it was a lot of fun. I fell in love with their discography all over again this year.

Okay... I'm only the top 10th listener of Volition??? I swear I played this album so many times. I need to know who the other 9 top listeners are. Volition is such a good album. I think Palimpsest is a more consistent album (as in, it's a no-skip album) but Volition have a lot of tracks with great replayability. So it's the best of both worlds: a strong album start to finish (it does have its weak tracks) and has songs that I can play over and over.

I am the top listener of 沒有人想念沒離開的人 by William Wei!! He really surprised me with this track. Typically he releases a lot of ballads. This song was... Not a ballad. It was way more groovy than I expect from Mr. Wei but more than anything, it had an ethereal quality to it. It felt tender but also a little forlorn at the same time. Outstanding track from William Wei.

My top tags this year were K-pop, Japanese, indie, rock, indie rock, J-pop, and J-rock. K-pop being my top genre was a little surprising to me... I think the other genres balance it out, though. I definitely think I do listen to too much K-pop. There's just so much more music out there!! This year I'm trying to listen to less K-pop.

This is a really cool graphic. So it kinda documents when I listen to music. A flat line means no music at all. And you can see dead times (aka sleeping hours) in the graph. Kinda looks like a mountain range that is drawn by a polygraph machine.

My top artist is TAEMIN with 2196 scrobbles. I'm a little surprised by the lack of scrobbles in January and February. Apparently I listened to a lot of Protest the Hero and Coheed and Cambria during that time frame. I think with the news of Taemin coming back from the military spurred on the listening in March/April.

My top artists this year were TAEMIN, NewJeans, Coheed and Cambria, and Protest the Hero. This bubble graph isn't the greatest. The smaller circles don't have any text and you need to hover over it to see the names. Not the greatest for wanting to share it with others (aka you, dear reader).

To the surprise of no one, my top album this year is NewJeans's Get Up with 589 scrobbles. It's impressive how it came out halfway through the year and managed to rocket up the charts. This album is good. It's a shame how short it is but I will take brevity if it means quality.

I love album collages... I blame /r/lastfm. Here are my top 25 albums of 2023.

1. Get Up by NewJeans
2. Medisina by zild: zild's latest album is really good. I don't really know how to describe his music. It's definitely not hard rock. Very mellow. Lots of songs about love. Typical Filipinos and their love songs. But zild makes it more modern and cool.
3. Ditto by NewJeans: Song. Of. The. Year. That is all.
4. Volition by Protest the Hero
5. KAI - The 1st Mini Album by Kai: I love this album so much. It is quality from start to finish. Sometimes I just have an urge to play it front to back and I never regret it. I am seriously shocked by it's staying power.
6. BB/ANG3L by Tinashe: This was a nice discovery this year. Her songs on this album really speaks to my Scorpio Venus. I love her drum and bass tracks. I think drum and bass is one of my favourite things now. Something about it just taps into my body. You know you have a good album when you manage to make my body groovy, my mouth sing, and my heart ache.
7. Never Gonna Dance Again Act 1 by TAEMIN: I have gushed about this album a lot in the past. While I have definitely not outgrown it yet whatsoever, it's a little tiresome for me to keep singing its praise. Just trust me when I say it's good.
8. Gasoline by Key: Gasoline. Is. So. Good. The first half of the album is a no skip for me. I love the b-sides on this album. It's funny, I think the title track is actually one of my least favourite tracks. Maybe it's just because I listen to it so much. But I can listen to Bound and Villain all day, everyday.
9. FAMOUS by TAEMIN: Famous is one of Taemin's best songs with the best choreo. The b-sides on this album are also pretty good. Taemin's b-sides are usually hit or miss for me but on this album, they are mostly hits.
10. INVU by TAEYEON: I gotta admit, the title track INVU is still a banger.
11. Guilty by TAEMIN: Okay. Guilty isn't my favourite release of Taemins. I listened to it a lot to try to figure out how I feel about it. It has grown on me a lot since its release. But... I don't know if any of the tracks crack my top 10 favourite Taemin tracks.
12. the record by boygenius: I really don't remember listening to this album this much. I did listen a lot to the singles, that's probably why. The album itself is highly okay.
13. Never Gonna Dance Again Act 2 by TAEMIN: See Act 1.
14. Sad Songs and Bullshit Part 1 by Juan Karlos: Finally... A Juan Karlos album. This was a slow build up. I was mostly keeping up with the singles he release throughout the year. He definitely caught my attention with the track he did with zild. He even got Ben&Ben on a track (I'm not a big Ben&Ben fan, tbh). But the last (?) single, ERE, really spoke to me. The album itself is alright but ERE... ERE takes the cake.
15. Lush by Snail Mail: I don't know why Lush suddenly made a comeback after not listening to it as much in 2022. Maybe I was feeling particularly sad this year, hah. But seriously, Lush is phenomenal. A no skip album. I can sing along to every single track. Well deserved.
16. Palimpsest by Protest the Hero: I mentioned Palimpsest earlier. This is an album you gotta listen to front to back in one go, which is something I did a lot. There are a few songs here and there with good replayability but this is full album listen.
17. 明天再見 by William Wei: Mostly listened to two tracks from this album. The rest of the songs were decent. But not really my thing.
18. HARD by SHINee: I admit... I don't really like this album that much. It did grow on me, though. I just did the typical k-pop fan thing where I tried to stream it as much as I could.
19. going...going...gone! by Hemlocke Springs: Discovered her in 2022 technically but she released sooooo many bangers in 2023. One of my favourite discoveries. The album itself isn't a no-skip, unfortunately, but it's still very good! A solid debut release.
20. Soft Spot by JMSN: This one caught me off guard. I'm not a big R&B person but JMSN really landed it with this album. The right amount of weird, heartfelt, and bop all rolled up into one.
21. This Land is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski: This one took a few listens for me to really get. The first listen was positive. It was a good listen. But nothing really stood out to me. After carefully paying attention to each song, I discovered that every single track was amazing on their own. Mitski does it again.
22. PHALARIS by DIR EN GREY: Okay I'm a little surprised about this one. This must have been from the first half of the year. PHALARIS was a great release from DIR EN GREY.
23. WANT by TAEMIN: Taemin really is eating up the charts in 2023. I think WANT is my favourite Taemin title track. It's just so... Crunchy. The beat is too good. It's so avante garde. And in terms of b-sides, I think Want has the best Taemin b-sides. Artist Groove is perfection. Never Forever and Truth are good slow tracks that don't fully go into ballad territory. Shadow is also hauntingly cool. Taemin's best mini album.
24. FOREVER 1 by SNSD: I really don't know how this one snuck in. There are maybe 3 tracks I like off of this album. But I really did listen to them quite a lot. I've never been a huge SNSD fan but I still have tender feelings for them. They're one of the OGs.
25. Priscilla by JMSN: Soft Spot made me revisit the only other JMSN album I know. I discovered a few more tracks from it that I liked, other than the two singles. It's kinda wild how young JMSN sounds in this album. It was released almost 12 years ago, after all.

SONG. OF. THE YEAR.

My top 5 tracks of 2023:

1. Ditto by NewJeans
2. Cool With You by NewJeans: I fell in love with this track immediately. It gives me high fashion catwalk vibes. It makes me want to fall in love.
3. *INVU by TAEYEON
4. **沒有人想念沒離開的人 by William Wei***
5. Moshi Moshi by EMI MARIA: This song is a leftover from last year. It's just that good. The not-so-subtle longing in the song is addictive.

Last.Year

The Playback is different from the Last.Year. It's in a different format, more web page than scrollable phone experience. A lot of the information is repeated but there are some differences.

For example, the total scrobbles gives a month by month breakdown instead and also compares it to last year. I think I prefer this view over the Playback view.

I like how this section also shows the top new artist. For me, that was boygenius this year. My library was also 49% new artists. Aiming for 50% next year!

Top new album is Get Up. Of course. Also have 61% new albums this year. 2020s just has a lot of good music, okay.

Top new track is Cool With You. Another non-surprise. With 58% new tracks. As I said earlier, I'm going to try to aim for 10k unique tracks this year.

What a fitting song to start off the year. The first song I scrobbled in 2023 was White Feathers by L'Arc~en~Ciel. A really pretty song and off of my favourite L'Arc~en~Ciel album, too.

A heat map of all my scrobbles every day. December and April were pretty consistent. April was consistent I think because of Taemin's military discharge. December because I was feeling particularly down and music comforts me.

I didn't take a screenshot of all my ratios but here they are in list form:

• Around 12.11 scrobbles per artist over 3.3k artists
• Around 6.93 scrobbles per album over 5.8k albums
• Around 4.34 scrobbles per track over 9.3k tracks

My ratios are about what I expect. I listen to a lot of playlists in order to discover new artists. Some artists/albums/tracks I listen to once and never again. Which balances out how obsessive I can get with certain artists/albums/tracks.

A less aesthetic but still aesthetic version of the mountain range. This is a circular bar graph that shows my peak listening times. Apparently that's 11am, hah.

I once ran Pudding's roast-my-Spotify tool and they said I don't listen to enough music released before 2019. It's true. My music taste is solidly in the 2020's, apparently. I should branch out and listen to more classics. But so many people are releasing super cool music nowadays.

My mainstream score is 58%. My most obscure artist is Ueda Tatsuya, apparently?? I think that makes sense because most of the songs I have from him in my library are bootlegs, lol.

Well, at least I'm consistent. Last year I was 58% as well. I want to be obscure, though. We'll give it a shot but my taste is honestly so basic, even though I talk like I have sophisticated taste.

One of my favourite pro features is the leaderboard. I don't bother competing with some of my friends on Last.fm. Some of them are truly power users.

This year I ranked 7th in terms of number of tracks scrobbled. I think my summer months contributed to my fall in rank.

I rank 14th. I have no idea how the top person on my leaderboard managed to listen to 99% new artists. That's awesome. It would be nice to hit 50% this year.

Conclusion

I love stats!! Last.fm is weird because the stats do kinda influence how I listen to music. It makes me want to discover more and go out of my comfort zone. I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm both hard and easy to please. I love finding new music and discovering new tracks. I feel weird when I get into listening ruts. So trying out different music is something I do naturally anyway.

Here's to another year of listening. Can't wait for NewJeans to come out with the next song of the year.