V7: Say hello to my listening diary
Monthly reports of my most-played music, going back to 2005
After finally completing the gargantuan task of manually adding metadata to thousands of my old tweets so they could be more integrated with the rest of my site, I wanted to keep the momentum going. So I turned to the last large personal data source that was still missing from my site: Last.fm, a service for tracking and sharing the music you listen to. As of a few days ago, I’ve been a Last.fm user for 21 years, and it’s rare for me to go even a day or two without interfacing with it in some way, making it perhaps my most-used internet thing of all time, even if most of that usage happens in the background.
In late 2005, Last.fm merged with Audioscrobbler, which was the service I originally joined, and so sending listening data to Last.fm is called “scrobbling.” To date I’ve scrobbled over 150,000 tracks from over 8,000 artists. Given my propensity for using my site to document my music purchases and concert-going, I was naturally eager to give my listening data a home here as well. But the breadth and depth of that data were intimidating. It’s fun to explore my Last.fm profile as a sprawling database, but what shape would that information take on my blog, where all my various online activity is oriented within a timeline? Making each track an individual post would be ridiculous, and even posts collecting a day’s or week’s listens would make a lot of clutter. Ultimately I decided that breaking it all up into monthly posts was sufficiently granular: When looking at one of my blog’s month archives, knowing what I was listening to at the time might add some interesting context to whatever else I was up to then.
But the volume of data was still an issue. Did the hundreds of tracks I listened to each month all need to be accounted for? Did the three minutes I once spent with an Osmonds song really warrant an Osmonds creator tag? Nope! Collating each month’s top 10 artists and top 10 albums seemed like a reasonable compromise, and for added context, I’d list the month’s total number of artists, albums, tracks, and plays. When I got wistful about the ton of data I’d be leaving on the cutting room floor, I reminded myself that the data isn’t comprehensive anyway, as I’ve listened to plenty of music over the last 21 years that for one reason or another never got scrobbled. And anyway, I’d still have the data and I could always do something more with it down the road when Last.fm inevitably goes the way of the dodo.
With all that decided, I started building some new site infrastructure to accommodate the incoming data, including overdue improvements to my bar-chart styles. When I started, I still wasn’t sure how I would even get all the data, as Last.fm doesn’t let you just download it, and I still don’t really know how to query an API. But less than a day after mentioning the project to my buddy Jon, who previously helped me with my Letterboxd data, I had a huge JSON file with everything I needed, plus one more addition to the pile of reasons I like Jon very much. As with past data excursions, I spent some time cleaning it up and hacking with Node.js to get everything neatly formatted into Markdown files, and less than a week after I started the project, my listening diary was born.
I’m glad to have it. Some entries are documents of how I self-soothed during a challenging time. Many make space for artists I kept coming back to who didn’t previously have a presence on the site, often because I streamed their music without writing about them or buying any of their records or seeing them live. Hopefully going back through the listening diary will help me start to rectify that. The diary also gives further emphasis to some artists who were already established favorites, sometimes in sad moments when they passed away. And I’m sure over time it’ll prove itself valuable in other ways. If you click around and find anything interesting, please let me know!