¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Fri, July 23

Music Stats

There are a number of things which tickle my fancy in very consistent ways.  Two of them are music and statistics.  Together, they form sort of a super-fancy-tickler-from-space or something.  There’s a handy little app that’ll pull your play counts data from iTunes and do some light processing of that (sorry, Mac only).  Let’s look at my data.

Songs: 4,159 songs
Listens: 37,711 listens
Duration: 98.6 days
Average: 9.1 listens/song
Favorite: 4-way tie; 30 listens each

Those four, by the way, are Weezer’s Tired Of Sex, The Dismemberment Plan’s Spider In The Snow and two from The Shins, Kissing The Lipless and their brilliant Young Pilgrims.

Numbers are cool, but what do they mean?  My play counts got reset when I got my G5 on October 6.  There were 291 days between October 6, 2003 and July 23, 2004.  Out of those 291 days, I’ve been awake for roughly 145 of them and of that five month timeframe, 68% of it has been spent listening to music.  That’s a lot of time spent listening to music.  Reminds me of that quote in High Fidelity:

What came first, the music or the misery?  People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over.  Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.  Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?  Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

I don’t mean to allude to being a sad bastard and wallowing in my own depressing music filth, a quick gander through my recent music would directly disprove that hypothesis.  No, rather that quote bubbles to the surface on account of the subject at hand.  You always have to wonder what’s the cause and what’s the effect or whether it’s a self-compounding system.  Do you choose your music to be a soundtrack for your life or do you bend your life around the music you listen to?

Personally, I choose the self-compounding system answer where the effect causes the cause which causes the effect.

16 people have chimed in.
→ Add your 2¢ by reading through and commenting at the end.

1 → owen  –  (Jul 23 2004,  3:09 PM)

itunes is mad cool.

2 → Shane Cavanaugh  –  (Jul 23 2004,  3:43 PM)

The last time I cleaned out my iTunes database was 2004/01/28, and since then I’ve gotten 41 listens out of “Pressed in a Book” by The Shins. I wish I hadn’t cleaned it out at all because I had been listening to pretty much nothing but The Shins since their second album came out, and I’m sure at least one of their song would have broken the 100 mark.

The self-compounding system answer is, I think, true, but that’s after it actually gets going. The question of how it starts seems to be similar to the chicken and the egg conundrum – what begat what. And the answer would be: Who gives a damn?! Shut up and listen to the song, Rob, you sappy bastard.

3 → Alec  –  (Jul 23 2004,  4:30 PM)

Wow, I guess iTunes statisticians like us just love The Shins. My top listen is “Gone For Good” with 34 listens, followed by 2 more tracks and then in a row, “Kissing The Lipless,” “Those To Come,” and “Know Your Onion.”  Go Shins.

4 → pd  –  (Jul 23 2004,  4:49 PM)

> Shut up and listen to the song, Rob, you sappy bastard.

Ha!  Well played good sir, well played!

Yeah, I would’ve loved to have been able to preserve my play counts and such when I moved my library over to this machine.  So much history was wiped clean with that transition.  What about the morning when I left Good Day Sunshine on repeat for 5+ hours because I was just in that bad of a mood, or what about the heavy, heavy rotation Weezer had gotten in the nearly two years iTunes had been storing data for me?  Gone, gone, gone!

But as Al has brought up, how are your stats, o readers?

5 → Shane Cavanaugh  –  (Jul 23 2004,  5:39 PM)

Not to mention the iPod, which has gotten more play than my iTunes itself; but I rotate tracks on that too often to keep an ongoing count.

I have 7,168 songs, but most of them are ones that I’m too much of a pack-rat to get rid of (read: they suck, I never listen to them, and I’m lazy). Therefore, I also won’t mention my “average.” I have had 6,647 listens (I guess you can figure out the average from that :/), and my Top 5™ songs are

1) “Pressed in a Book” - The Shins
2) “When I Goose-step” - The Shins
3) “The Shadowlands” - Ryan Adams
4) “Orange Blue (Allison)” - the nines
5) “This House Is Not For Sale” - Ryan Adams

So, it’s obvious my two favorite artists are The Shins and Ryan Adams. the nines got in there from something akin to your Good Day Sunshine phase.

Lastly, I only condescend to such abysmal valleys for the greatest of things, but: i <3 iTunes.

6 → owen  –  (Jul 24 2004,  9:47 AM)

Most played
Blame It On The Drink 60 Conscious Collecktive Audikt issue 1 3:39 UK Hip-Hop 29 7/20/2004 10:27 PM

that’s 29 times got that from Audikt.com
but usually I’m listening to 50 mb mp3 files I download from a dominican radio station.  underground

7 → Marty  –  (Jul 24 2004, 11:06 AM)

Wow. I am so not proud of myself.

Most Played: “Gimme The Night” by Laptop with 143 listens.

Time to reset my counters.

8 → Laura  –  (Jul 24 2004,  1:30 PM)

By far most played is “Black Cadillacs” - Modest Mouse, due to a particular evening where that song was played on repeat for three hours. 

9 → john guari  –  (Jul 24 2004,  2:54 PM)

it took me frickin’ forever to find this after stereoboy.org was no more. i always enjoyed reading stereoboy.org. though my needs don’t necessitate an Apple computer, it’d be neat to have one, as well as that statistics app for iTunes.

as it is, i just have iTunes for Windows as my preferred player of music. my most played song is “Walking Under Green Leaves” by Spymob. Spymob is the backing band for N*E*R*D when the go out on tour, and have a great CD of their own material called Sitting Around Keeping Score.

nice site design too. very readable. glad i found it.

10 → skippy  –  (Jul 24 2004,  3:58 PM)

wowzas

gob- i cut myself too with a playcount of 255
mighty mighty bosstones- impression that i get playcount 250
chasin you around- sugar ray playcuont 248
im sorry my songs arent so nearly unheard of you allses. but i listen to what i like.

11 → Shane Cavanaugh  –  (Jul 24 2004,  4:11 PM)

Wow, skippy. Wow.

12 → pd  –  (Jul 24 2004,  5:41 PM)

> im sorry my songs arent so nearly unheard of you allses. but i listen to what i like.

On the scale of things, enjoyment is more important than obscurity by a few orders of magnitude.

13 → Colleen  –  (Jul 25 2004, 12:23 AM)

“Caring Is Creepy”- The Shins, 46 listens

14 → jessi  –  (Jul 25 2004,  1:19 PM)

toxic - britney spears… 60 times. 
you can all stop  being my friend… NOW.
(it’s on my workout mix!… either that or i’m just nostalgic for charlie dancing to it in scott’s dorm room in his bright purple crew pants, oh those were the days :D )

15 → Debashis  –  (Jul 27 2004,  9:13 AM)

“Greater Omaha” - Desaparecidos - 42 times
“Perfect Sonnet” - Bright Eyes - 39 times
“Just Like Heaven” - The Cure - 32 times
“What’s New for Fall” - Desaparecidos - 31 times…

Allthough the new Cure Album I bought last week is quickly climbing…It could be due to the fact that I’m in love and The Cure is the Soundtrack of Love…

16 → pd  –  (Jul 27 2004,  9:21 AM)

> The Cure is the Soundtrack of Love…

Apparently someone has never heard My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.






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