20 years with Last.fm
I have now had a profile on Last.fm for 20 years. Started with the track and album āVinterskuggeā by Isengard. First of all, I think it is remarkable that a service such as Last.fm has existed for so long without really being the victim of enshittification like almost everything else. They pretty much do the same thing they have always done, provide statistics for the music you listen to through various music player plugins. Just fun insightful stats. No constant push to use the service more or less than I want to. No dumb inclusion of AI and a very reasonable totally optional subscription model.
Stats
Over the years I have tracked over 80.000 tracks across little over 5100 different artists. I havenāt logged absolutely everything, like whatever is on the radio in the car, but most of my listening has been on the computer while working, so I wager the wast majority of all the music I have listened to in the last 20 years is logged in my profile.
Going through the stats becomes a reflecting of where I was in my life at that point in time. The stats shown below makes it clear I had more time to listen to music from 2005 to 2009, which was when I was studying and had plenty of time for myself and my headphones. I started working full time in fall 2009 and the total number of songs listened to fell from over 8000 per year to around 3000 on average. I think that just reflect that I couldnāt just sit with my headphones on all day, but gradually got more responsibility and need to actually talk to co-workers.
Then COVID happened in 2020-2021 and the stats tanked to around 1000 per year. I worked a lot from home and given my wife and kids was also home a good deal of the time, I couldnāt allow myself to isolate myself completely with headphones on. And also, I just didnāt really feel the same need to listen to music. The silence at home was pleasant enough. Recent years have gradually grown back to around 3000 listens per year and 2025 appears to be on a similar trajectory.
What streaming changed
In 2005 I was buying CDs and ripping them. I had several hundred CDs and while I explored plenty of new names, the majority of my listening was my own albums. This has changed with streaming entering the picture. I am still mostly an album listener, and I donāt use playlists that much. To dive deeper into this change I looked at the stats for 2006 with 4777 listens (or scrobbles as it is called in Last.fm) and 2024 with 3123 scrobbles.
In 2024 I listened to 277 different albums, where I have defined listened to an album when there is tracked 5 or more listens in that year. There will of course be some edge cases, but it seems like a reasonable cutoff. In 2006 only 179 albums fit that same criteria, and that is with more than 1500 more tracks listened to that year.
Music streaming has shifted my listening that explores many more different artists. Many artists I only listen to for one album, and it is generally rare for me to find a new artist that will be one I frequently return to. This has been through especially Spotifyās recommendations for new releases and blogs I follow with review of new albums.
Music
As for my taste, it generally hasnāt changed that much. Black and death metal have always been at the very top, but thrash has been something I have explored more in recent years. Previously it was mostly limited to Slayer. Classical music and opera have also been a very large part of my music habits, though somewhat less in recent years. There was a period where I was into the operas of Richard Wagner and I listened through many different recordings of the Nibelungen. My all time top 20 is still pretty representative of my general taste and all artists I listen to today:
Even going through the rest of the list list the vast majority of names here are stuff I have listened to for 15 years or more. With a notable exception in the Finnish band Havukruunu I found in 2017 and I now considered them in my top 3 of black metal bands along with Darkthrone and Bathory. The stats from 2024 confirm that I mostly listen to new releases with a high discovery rate:
What is missing
Some minor aspects of my music taste doesnāt show up as much in these stats, because they are more varied in artists. Before I got into metal, I listened to goa trance and while names like Astral Projection and MFG show up in the top artists list, most of my old CDs are various compilations with various names. Occasionally I can also put on some EBM or aggrotech, and much of that has been from the Endzeit Bunkertracks compilation albums. Hocico is probably the only name I have listened to enough for it to appear in the top lists.
As a service, Last.fm still delivers exactly what it promises - and nothing more. Besides the stats, it is also a great alternative for music discovery beyond what the various algorithms of the streaming services offer. Last.fm is of course also dependant on recommendation algorithms of some sort, but I think it points me in different and often more interesting directions than the streaming services. However, maybe I should try and focus more on actual listening to bands more than once. It is fun to try and keep up with new releases, but it is rare to hit something like Havukruunu that became an instant favourite from almost the first listen. I am sure there are many bands that I could come to love, given that I allow myself to listen to them more than just once.