Music in the Year 2011

Though I don't play any instrument, can't dance, nor carry a tune, I have an appreciation for music. My life unfolds to a soundtrack that plays in my head. Patterned after a Rolling Stone article, I once described:

• My Life in Music

For the last 2 years, I have analyzed what I have listened to using the data from my iTunes XML file:

• Music in the Year 2009
• Music in the Year 2010

I thought I would keep the tradition going. By importing my iTunes data into Microsoft Excel, I found:

1. I listened to 1,348 different songs from 350 different albums by 172 different artists. That's down from last year since I listened to 1,691 songs. I must be spending more time in the lab.

2. The 10 artists with the most songs I listened to include (from most to least):

   1. Todd Rundgren
   2. Peter Gabriel
   3. Peter Frampton
   4. The Pursuit Of Happiness
   5. Paul Carrack
   6. Jackson Browne
   7. Led Zeppelin
   8. Sister Hazel
   9. Aerosmith
   10. The Tubes

   Sister Hazel was a new addition this year.

3. Even though when I buy new music I practically play it to death when I first get it, most of the songs I listened to were released in 2010 (96 of them) and 2009 (95 of them) instead of 2011 (85 of them).

   

   The oldest song I listened to was "In The Still of the Night" by The Five Satins which was released in 1956 - three years before I was born. To encourage more variety this year, I created a smart playlist called not this year:
   
   

   This should help me listen to songs once and avoids bringing up Christmas music randomly throughout the year.

4. The shortest song was only 3 seconds long "SynthTwinkleIntro." Peter Gabriel provided the bits that makeup "Games Without Frontiers" as part of a remix pack. In addition to listening to them, I converted some of them to ringtones. The longest song was Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" at 22 minutes and 43 seconds. By the way, my average song is 3 minutes and 29 seconds.

5. Rock, Alternative Rock, and Pop comprise most of what I listen to:

   

6. Music critics contend that 2011 was the year of the female vocalist. Let's test that theory. If my listening habits are representative of the population:

   

   Since I don't own any Lady Gaga albums, I am probably not representative of the population.

7. If you copy all of the song titles from Excel and paste them into Wordle, you get a word cloud that looks like:

   

   If you paste that same data into WriteWords, you can exact stats:

   Count	Word
   198	the
   100	you
   80	of
   73	i
   63	in
   61	to
   57	love
   57	a
   46	on
   46	it

For the third year in a row, analyzing personal listening habits by massaging data is alive in the lab.