Music in the Year 2010

A year ago, a friend of mine, Roger Linder, commented on his Facebook page:

Roger Linder listened to 9,474 different songs in 2009, according to my iTunes last played statistics.

When I originally read this, it inspired me to write a blog article entitled Music in the Year 2009. I decided to do it again. To figure out what I listened to last year:

1. In iTunes, I sorted my Music Library by the Last Played column. If this column is not visible to you in iTunes, you can add it via the View -> Options for the Column Browser List View.

2. I selected the first song played on 01/01/2010 and scrolled to the last song played on 12/31/2010. I used shift-click to select the songs in between. I listened to 1,691 different songs as indicated at the bottom of my iTunes window. Last year I only listened to 1,134 songs. That's a 49% increase!

3. I then started Microsoft Excel.

4. With all of the songs selected, I issued a Control-C command in iTunes, changed windows, and issued a Control-V command in Excel. Voila. All of the relevant data from the iTunes Music Library was now in Excel.

5. Once in the workbook, I had the full power of Excel with the ability to create Pivot tables to slice and dice the results in various forms.

Here's what I learned.

1. The longest song I listened to in 2010 was a 20 minute 42-second version of Stravinsky's "The Firebird" Suite by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra And Chorus.

2. Since the "number of plays" is cumulative since I started my iTunes collection, for the songs I listened to in 2010, the average number of times I have heard those songs is a little more than twice. Last year I noted that I listened to "Courage" by Todd Rundgren 38 times. Today the play count still stands at 38. I went a whole year without replaying it. I guess music catches my fancy for a period, and then I move on.

3. Though my formative musical years of high school and college were in the 70's and 80's, most of what I listen to is new - from 2000 to 2009 - not brand new since the 2010's have only one year.
   

   The oldest song I listened to last year was "Eight Days A Week" from the 1964 Beatles For Sale album. The newest song was "Weightless (Less Is More Version)" by Natasha Bedingfield.

4. The artists that I listened to most last year were Todd Rundgren, Paul Carrack, Genesis, and Kate Bush. Rundgren and Carrack were one and two last year, so I guess this makes it official - they are my favorites.

5. Once again I am a rock 'n' roll kind of guy.
   

   Regarding Holiday music, you will see there is one on the list. I listened to "Thank God It's Christmas" by Queen because I happen to have a Smart Playlist that looks for song titles with the word "god."

6. Feeding the list of song titles into WriteWords.org, the most frequently appearing words (that were not articles) were: love, all, live, don't, one, down, want, hey, and baby. Given the state of popular music, these words should sound very familiar to you. Unfortunately, Wordle.net does not run on Windows 7. A word cloud would have been a more compelling way to show frequently occurring words in song titles.

7. In 2010 I listened to songs from 444 albums - everything from 1 by the Beatles to Zone Collectibles Volume 12 from a local Arizona radio station. Yesterday I had a conversation with Facebook friend of friend, Becky Chavarria, regarding the term album. Since an album is a collection of songs, much like a photo album is a collection of pictures, the term still applies. Terms like record, as in vinyl record, or CD, as in compact disc, are waning in usage as everyone gets their music via downloads.

Once again, analyzing personal listening habits by massaging data is alive in the lab.