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Trivial Personal Milestone – 150k scrobbles

June 20th, 2012 - 7:52 am | No Comments | Audio, Emotions, Research

Scrobbling is a service from Last.FM that keeps track of all the music I’ve played to produce a personal music profile. I started scrobbling on April 21st, 2004 after hearing about it during a conversation between ex-Nullsoft crew huddled in a private IRC room. Later on once Last.FM and Scrobbler merged in 2005 I forgot about my profile and let it go. Since that time I’ve visited the site once every few months to see what music has been recommended to me. There hasn’t been much movement on the site since being acquired by CBS in 2007, as they slowly gutted many of the better features of the site.

Anyway, point being I’ve finally reached 150,000 scrobbles, putting me in the top 1% of all scrobblers that aren’t doing it just to game the system. On the left is an artist cloud from the 3 previous months, based on tracks listened to. The massive Japanese name dead center is Yoko Kanno (9,482 times played), a prolific Japanese music producer that has many amazing and varied albums under her belt. To get a true feel as to what I’ve been listening to I’d recommend visiting Normalisr, which ranks your logged listening habits based on time instead of number of tracks, thus making it much more accurate.

A few lesser known recommended artists:

  • Steve Reich – Music For 18 Musicians. I refuse to classify his scores as minimalist, because they are anything but that. No technology or electronics involved, just amazingly talented musicians producing the most lush and naturally evolving soundscapes I’ve heard in my life till this moment. Watching a live rendition has been on my bucket list for a while.
  • Tommy Emmanuel – In my opinion the best living solo entertainer and fingerpicking guitarist of our time. ‘Initiation’ is one song, if you could even call it that… a soundscape that simply cannot be recorded properly and must be heard live, his shows are always a treat and family friendly. Do yourself a favor and click his name to watch his amazing ‘cover’ of Classical Gas.
  • Bonobo – Natural downtempo published by Ninja Tune, also amazing live.
  • Yoko Kanno & The Seatbelt’s – Cowboy Bebop Box Set. Jazz and more… the albums are so varied it’d be hard to cover em’ all. Samples: Slow Jazz, Fast Jazz, Pure Moodish.
  • More of Yoko Kanno – be sure to check out the “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” album. Samples one, two and three.
  • Bear McCreary’s Season 3 soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica.
  • _ensnare_ – Danceable 8-bit blippy bloppy awesomeness
  • Bassnectar – Dubstep, breakbeat, electronic, glitch, breaks. We also happen to share a first name. If you like his stuff check out Deadmau5 as well, but you probably already know of em’.

I have to stop here, there are many more great singles than complete albums. I’ve actually been rating all 19k+ tracks/compliations in my musical library on a scale of 0 to 5 in 0.5 steps, once I’m closer to completion I will post what I think are the best of the best (there are only 46 5-star tracks out of 13k tracks I’ve already hand rated!). Maybe I should post about music more often, I find it fun :)

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