I love Last.fm. I do. If you don’t know it yet, please give it a click and peek a little bit around. It logs everything you listen, on a variety of software and some hardware as well; and it gives you statistics, recommendations and a nice community to be part of.
Bless the day when I first registered this service and bless the day when I first started installing the scrobbler everytime I formated my system. I now have access to my almost perfect (they haven’t found out a way to scrobble vinyl yet) music listening history since 2006.
Definitely my favourite visualization of this data is LastGraph, which compiles all your data into nice looking historical graphs. For example, this is my full 2008 history nicely plotted (mind you, it’s a heavy download), and when I look at it I can remember and feel those moments in time when I just felt like listening to Feist all day, when I discovered the wonders of Nick Drake or when I listened to Kings of Convenience for weeks after their show.
So I found myself thinking… how much do I listen to music? Given the day I started scrobbling all my tunes, the number of songs I listened to since then as well as an average song length (note that 3 minutes and 20 seconds is actualy 3,33 minutes), I can quantify (within a reasonable doubt gap) what percentage of time I have spent listening to music. So I came up with this (in Python):
from datetime import date
def f(since, playcount, length=3.33):
return playcount * length / 60.0 / 24.0 / \
(date.today() - since).days
And running it, according to my data, I got:
>>> f(date(2006,3,27), 61079) 0.13451922619047621
Or in other words, since 27 March 2006, I have spent 13.45% of my time listening to music, which is 141,24 out of 1050 days. It’s an interesting statistic, given that you scrobble often.