lastgraph rendering of the last 6 months of my music listening history
When I finally created a last.fm account in December, it was not because I wanted to join a “social music revolution” but because I was interested in data. Sure iTunes kept track every song I played, but last.fm scrobbles were more easily turned into visual and dynamic data. I went through the rigmarole of friending people the first few days on last.fm, but this keeping up with the digital Jones soon gave way to just checking my most played charts. My fascination with other social networking sites is the same. Facebook is primarily interesting because it makes visible the once abstract web of who knows who. This is the Internet for introverts.
So I was excited to have finally generated enough data for a visualization of my music listening habits. I could track the ascension of new artists in my collection and the reemergence of old favorites. The overall result was surprisingly sinusoidal — it seems my relationship with music does ebb and flow, as does my relationship with most things.
Supposedly, our music tastes are date us. Music taste ossifies in our early twenties, after which our ears become hostile to new artists. Rather than have the artists be randomly assigned a color, it’d be interesting to see them color-coded by decades active or genre (or maybe not, as everything would just be a shade of indie.) I patiently await the longitudinal study. Long after social networking sites are in vogue, I hope I can still mine this data.
I have used Last.fm to listen to music only a handful of times–and I enjoyed it. But my primary interest in Last.fm is an obsessive obsession with data.