This is a sort of experiment in the spirit of yearly goals or new years resolutions. While I realize I started late (on January 5th, late in the evening, practically January 6th in my timezone), I decided I would go through with it anyway.
My goal for the year is to log 36,500 plays on last.fm in a year. This blog will be a weekly chronicling of my journey through music old and new over the next year. It's been a while since I wrote any sort of blog, let alone one publicly available.
After registering for a new account on last.fm, I started scrobbling my plays. After a week of plays, I now have just a bit over 800 plays as of this writing - good momentum, 100 plays over what should be weekly goal. We'll see if I can keep it up.
Additionally, music added to the library on this account will only account for actual scrobbles. I am not using any of the tools available to scan my entire library into last.fm. I feel this will allow the overall statistics to be more representative of my listening habits over the course of a year.
At the start of my week, within the first day my most-scrobbled artist was Daft Punk. This didn't really surprise me, as I tend to get into grooves where I will stick to listening to one artist over the course of a few weeks. In an attempt to try and diversify some of the artists listed on the account, I decided to get back to going through some of my backlog of new artists. I also went through my library and hand picked a few artists that I hadn't listened to in a while, but knew I wanted them to be represented somehow in this project.
So, let's kick this off with my top 15 artists for the last week:
- The Flashbulb - 85 plays
- Daft Punk - 62 plays
- Bonobo - 43 plays
- Freescha - 37 plays
- No Sun In September - 36 plays
- Justice - 32 plays
- The Kills - 31 plays
- Lost Sounds - 23 plays
- Starfucker - 23 plays
- Alamo Race Track - 22 plays
- The Polyamorous Affair - 20 plays
- Primal Scream - 16 plays
- Digitalism - 16 plays
- Zomby - 16 plays
- Lemongrass - 15 plays
No Sun In September made #5 because I listened to the album Soundtravelling In The Area Of Lake Karachay three times in one sitting while working on a few other projects. It was quite enjoyable, and may make its way into my list of favorite minimalist albums.
More suprising to me though, was The Flashbulb's surge to the top of the list - I haven't listened to this artist in months, and actually didn't even start listening to any of his albums again until two or three days ago, but I find it hard to pull away.
In spite of the variety found in the top 15 artists list this week, the top 15 tracks are much less interesting. The majority of them are tracks from Daft Punk's Alive 2007 album, which I listened to four times towards the start of this project, and each track has its place near the top. I'll probably refrain from posting the top 15 tracks unless they get a little more diverse artist-wise (which may not ever happen if I continue in my recent practice of listening to music at a rate of albums instead of tracks).
Lastly, here is a playlist comprised of some of my favorite tracks from the top 8 artists this week:
The Flashbulb - Highway One
Daft Punk - Human After All
Bonobo - Change Down
Freescha - Rinky Dink
No Sun in September - Techa
Justice - Phantom Pt. II
The Kills -Baby Says
Lost Sounds - Clones Don't Love
I've uploaded this playlist to 8tracks.com at
http://8tracks.com/flcl1979/week-one
Additionally, feel free to follow my last.fm profile at
http://www.last.fm/user/flcl1979
At this point, I have no idea if I will succeed at my goal of 36,500 plays, or if anyone will actually read this blog. But I'm willing to see how far I can take it.
Here's to a year in music.
-flcl1979
