I Am Very Tall

Some of you that actually visit the blog directly may have noticed the last.fm widget on the side. As of today, that widget is outdated. I signed up for last.fm in 2005 and was impressed by the core concept. I'm all about getting an external view on who I am and what I do, and last.fm was exactly that with regards to music. It's also pretty cool to see who your musical peers are and what they're listening to.

I stopped using last.fm for a while, because the service was still pretty clunky and the Scrobbler (where do they get these words?) would crash my computer pretty routinely. Besides, last.fm couldn't keep track of anything that I listened to off of the computer, which at that point was about 60% of my musical consumption. So, I let iTunes keep track of all my musical doings.

Today, I imported all of my iTunes history back into last.fm and am now using it to manage everything. I had to ditch my old last.fm profile, but in return, I get to see about 25x more data. Looking at the evidence, I'm struck by a few things about myself.

1. My listening habits are highly concentrated in a core set of artists. I wish I could pop the data into Excel so I could draw up the concentration chart.
2. I'm a lot less musically adventurous than I thought I was. Back in the day, I would have said that I'm pretty balanced across genres. The data doesn't lie - I'm a dyed-in-the-wool mainstream rock fan with indie leanings. Hip hop and electro are just blips on the radar of my listening habits.
3. I'm a lot less passionate about the music that I'm listening to today. My profile is almost entirely based on what I listened to about a year ago. Since then, I've barely listened to anything in my Top 20 artists/albums. Of the albums that I'm listening to now, they barely register in my overall charts.

If I ever have a kid, I'm going to have him scrobble pretty much everything he/she listens to. I think it would be so cool to have the entire history of your musical consumption ready for review. In case anyone's interested in seeing my tastes, ranging from roughly January 2006 to the present, take a look here.