Because I am headed out of town for several days, today is basically this week’s Friday post—just for fun. Last week I looked at my musical tastes via the vinyl. Today I look at the digital streams of music. This is far less surprising and arguably more representative of my tastes more broadly. Unlike records, which I need to physically own to play, here I can stream and record almost anything.
Unlike vinyl record plays, my streaming records do not record album plays per se, and yet that is how I prefer to listen to music. I.e., I do not listen to playlists or radio streams, rather I choose an album I want to listen to and then play through that and then select another album. Consequently, when my songs are scrobbled and the total album plays counted, I divide the total number of plays by the number of songs on the album to get a sense of how many times I “played the record”.
Finally, I also just included the top songs, even though these are generally grouped by the top albums. But, as you shall see, a definite trend emerges there.
No surprise(s), but Radiohead comes out on top as my favourite artist. A real shocker there. The rest of the artists make sense to me, because they are all among my favourites. What I found interesting is that, unlike when I looked at the last six months of 2025, no blues artists appear in the top-10, when I do love the blues, especially the Chicago blues.
Top albums interest me, but do not necessarily shock me. I listened to Metric’s new album several times after they first released it and I very much enjoy it, so that I have played it 12.5 times fails to surprise me. I do wonder if the spring and summer seasons affect my selections here. Rather, I am certain that they do, but I would need to crunch those numbers specifically to see the pattern.
Finally, when it comes to top songs, you would expect the top-10 to be largely from the aforementioned new album by Metric. And the back half of the list is. But really, the story here is say I have a playlist for when I watch or listen to the Red Sox and they win, without saying I have a playlist I listen to after watching or listening to the Red Sox win. Alas, this year the Red Sox are terrible so the number of plays here are not that high. Or at least not as high as I would like.
I will be curious to see how this data all changes by year’s end. I can almost guarantee you that Muse’s new album, The Wow! Signal, will be up there in top album plays. They released it at the end of June and I have been listening to that quite frequently the last few weeks. And by the time we get into and then past autumn and into the beginning of winter, my aforementioned seasonality in songs will surely add some different artists, albums, and songs to the list. And, of course, if I am lucky, the Sox will turn things around and I will play my playlist many more times.
Of course now the designer in me wants to follow this through to its logical conclusion and make an interactive music explorer where I can delve more deeply into the records, pun fully intended. Maybe I will think about that when I am out of town.
Credit for the piece is mine.