tunequest

A rambling, self-indulgent, inconsequential post about habits, statistics, speculations, accumulation and missing data. :: I can't help but be disappointed that I can't see lifetime stats for my music listening habits. In these days of play count-tracking programs like iTunes and websites like Last.fm, it's easy to get caught up in the musical trends of your life. It's especially interesting when you look at the numbers and discover that you perhaps ...

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I spent part of the past weekend doing some basic statistical analysis of my iTunes Library. I've been collecting music for 16ish years now, so I decided to see what kind of historical trends I could find. One task I assigned myself was to look at the variety of the time span of the releases in my collection. Now I don't have to do any fancy calculations to tell ...

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The vast array of listening information available at Last.fm probably had a great deal to do with CBS's decision to purchase the company. Though I'm wary of the deal, I've not lost all hope for the site. The Audioscrobbler technology behind it is some pretty fascinating stuff and the data it collects is open and available be analyzed, interpreted, shared and displayed in a lot of diverse applications. Hopefully, ...

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Anyone who has been reading the tunequest for a while knows that statistics, numbers, figures and graphs have played a large part in its progress. In fact, it was the discovery that 10% of my songs were responsible for 49% of my total play counts that prompted me to set out on this endeavor in the first place. To this day, I'm still surprised by the lack of sophisticated options ...

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Have a graph. This chart excludes film and classical music, focusing on popular releases. The blue line shows the total number of songs from each year of release in my library. The green line shows the cumulative playcount for records released that year. Make of it what you will, but apparently 2001 and 2003 were very good years for music.

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This is the latest update of my progress, with projection to the end of the year.

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2008 Music Listening Activity Visualization generated by LastGraph Standard Deviation of Release Year Segmented by Calendar Year This graph shows the variety of the year of release for each year that I've been collecting music. The lower the number, the more consistent the year of release is for albums I acquired that year. In the 1990's you see lower numbers because at the time I was mostly into 90's rock. Later, as I ...

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