metric reflection

Listening Rates

So, as promised, the second part of my best of 2008 list.  But first, a note about methodology.

There are two lists here: most listened to albums and most listened to albums (advanced).  The simpler one is merely a sum of iTunes’ PlayCount field for all songs in an album.  All albums with more than 100 plays are included.  The advanced list is quite a bit more complex.  Starting with the simple list, I first added the album’s track count and then divided the track count by the play count – because why should an album with 15 tracks, if listened all the way through, get more playcounts than an album with 10?  Secondly, I counted the number of days from the Date Added field until 12/31/08 and divided the modified playcount field by this number.  The result is, in theory, the number of times per day an album was played in iTunes/iPod, and, again, in theory, the number of times I listened to it (sometimes I forget to turn the iTunes off).  A couple caveats: I had to throw out everything from the last 2 weeks or so, because 1 listen to an album in 10 days gives it an abnormally high count.  If I was a bit better at stats/cared more, I’d do a logarithmic analysis of the day count to play count, but that’s a bit more effort than I feel like putting in.

So, first, the simple play count:

As I mentioned in my last post, Vampire Weekend sat at the top of my playlist for a very long time in the early part of this year.  Frightened Rabbit held a similar honor at the end of the year.  None of this really surprises me; some of these albums had songs I really loved that I listened to over and over (see: Say Hi, The Helio Sequence) but whose albums were not entirely cohesive.  I guess this also shows that I don’t always spend a lot of time listening to the albums I thought were the ‘best’; that might be a representation of the perennial disconnect between artistic value and listenability value (though I tried not to succumb to made up artistic rationales since I have 0 experience in that).

Finally, it looks like there’s a natural break after Pomegranates; after that, the playcount changes only slightly.  That may have been just as good of a breakpoint as my arbitrary 100+ plays rule.  That would mean that Pomegranates and below show my Top 17 most listened to albums.  Exciting.

Advanced:

Here, the actual numbers driving those lines don’t mean much (they’re actually all in the .3 and below range) without careful thought, so I got rid of them.  Like I expected, Glasvegas and Amanda Palmer pushed to the top in almost no time; I’ve probably listened to those two albums 5-10 times each since I picked them up in early December.  There are a couple surprisses on here.  I was a Cub Scout – I didn’t even really care for this album.  How did I listen to it so many times?  Well – I picked it up in November on a finish up my eMusic downloads whim and ended up listening to it 3 times before rating it and putting it into my regular rotation system.  Same goes for Loney, Dear, but I liked it a bit more so actualy went out of my way to listen to it a few times.  Talkdemonic – that one I put in the background a few times.  I’m honestly surprised that Frightened Rabbit is so low on the list; it probably is a consequence of me not understanding the album until I was a few listens in.  I’m surprised Beck’s Modern Guilt didn’t show up on here; I don’t remember listening to anything else for at least a week or two after it came out.

So  that’s it.  One more post for the year on miscellaneous errata, review, etc.