On Web Culture

This year, for the first time, I kept track of my listening habits. This was courtesy of my iPod & last.fm.

I was interested to find out whether my self-described music taste of “white man rock music” was true or not. Below is the top 10 artists by number of plays for the last 12 months:

1. Radiohead – 408 plays
2. Coldplay – 397 plays
3. U2 – 326 plays
4. The Prodigy – 176 plays
5. Michael Jackson – 155 plays
6. The Mars Volta – 127 plays
7. Eddie Vedder – 123 plays
8. Red Hot Chili Peppers – 98 plays
9. Nine Inch Nails – 92 plays
10. Rage Against the Machine – 89 plays

And looking at the top 10 I feel that’s a pretty good definition of white man rock music. Especially for someone who was a teenager in the 90’s.

Perhaps an exception is Michael Jackson which is just a straight output of Michael Jackson dying. I think I ended up listening to his music intensively for a couple of months.

Eddie Vedder is the only other outlier & he is in there solely due to the ‘Into The Wild’ soundtrack. I played the heck out of that soundtrack over the past year, I really rate it.

If you take out Eddie Vedder & Michael Jackson the next two artists just outside the top 10 are also white man music: Simon & Garfunkel and Fleet Foxes. More folk than rock though which is encouraging.

The Prodigy probably wouldn’t be as high as they are if I hadn’t listened to the track ‘Take Me To The Hospital’ 57 times in the last 12 months. That was one-third of all The Prodigy I listened to & my second most popular track over the whole 12 months. It’s a great tune.

What was interesting was Last.fm lets you graph your listening habits against the greater Last.fm population as part of their Best Of 2009 write-up. Below is my The Prodigy listening habits versus the rest of the last.fm population for October 2008 to October 2009. You can see me as the red line picking up on The Prodigy’s newest album ‘Invaders Must Die’ about two months after the rest of the world :-)

Last.fm The Prodigy listens versus my listens – October 2008 to October 2009

Source: last.fm

My most listened to track over the last 12 months? Iron & Wine’s ‘Naked As We Came’.