Poniedziałek 21 Lip 2008, 3:43

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On Monday, July 21, 2008 I decided to reset my playcount here on last.fm. I had 22020+ tracks played by 782 unique artists.

My top 50 artists charts that I had:
ARTISTS / PLAYS
Diablo Swing Orchestra 406
Therion 338
Voltaire 258
Dylath-Leen 253
Opeth 248
Apocalyptica 225
Decadence 214
Hollenthon 211
To-Mera 201
Meshuggah 197
Tristania 194
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum 193
Turisas 164
Madder Mortem 161
Sikth 161
Stolen Babies 160
Gojira 160
The Dresden Dolls 158
Korpiklaani 157
Human Ground 152
Slayer 151
Devin Townsend 150
Unexpect 136
Joe Satriani 135
The Kovenant 133
Einherjer 133
Aesma Daeva 132
Dream Theater 131
Pelican 131
Mattias IA Eklundh 130
Eluveitie 126
Rasputina 125
Am I Blood 122
Wrathchild America 122
Dethklok 109
Iron Maiden 109
Týr 108
Strapping Young Lad 107
Hilary Hahn 106
Darzamat 105
Anthrax 103
Thyrfing 99
Morbid Angel 98
Arch Enemy 94
Biomechanical 92
Ayreon 92
Textures 92
Finntroll 90
Death Angel 89
The Taste Of Chaos Ensemble 88

Why did I reset? Mainly to get rid of unwanted crap that I had the misfortune of listening to at one time or another. Garbage that tended to have the word "core" in the genre name. Shitty music that I will make a point of not listening to this time around, or make sure I delete within the 2 week time period if I don't like it. There were some mistagged or misspelled artists names that I've since corrected. And there was some music that just annoyed me when I tried listening to my radio station (see "core" comment above, I'm not an "emo" kid so I don't know where that crap came from either, and there was some of what I call "pop" by my loose definition of the term, ie: commercial radio music - anything explicitly designed for commercial exploitation). I even remember quite a few instances were Last.fm disregarded the tags I had and listed the bands incorrectly.

I sat down to listen to my radio station the other day. The first 5 songs where screamo metal core crap that I only listened to a few times in order to decide that I didn't like it - dammit! I should of excluded that crap. It didn't really bother me when it played a Michael Jackson song after a Deicide song, but it left me scratching my head since I haven't listened to any MJ on here. I checked my charts and sure enough there was one MJ song - Smooth Criminal. It was actually a MJ cover song done by Alien Ant Farm that I had listened to. This seems to be common problem with cover songs. The track in question was correctly tagged by performing artist but incorrectly scrobbled by Last.fm.

And on the subject of Last.fm screwups: would you believe that Last.fm scrobbled the band Prong as Prong Prong Prong? There is a record label called Vitamin Records that produces "string tributes" honoring mainstream and indie groups alike. They have put out a large number of albums (232)that put a classical spin on many genres of music, including rock, pop, punk, techno, hardcore, country, metal and rap. When I first started scrobbling these albums it was confusing trying to determine if String Quartet, String Quartet Tribute, The String Quartet Tribute, The Vitamin String Quartet or Vitamin String Quartet was the correct tag. Well once I had things correctly tagged as Vitamin String Quartet what do you think The String Tribute To Iron Maiden scrobbled as? Iron Maiden. The String Tribute To Dream Theater scrobbled as Vitamin String Quartet, but the String Tribute to Metallica scrobbled as Metallica. A few months later they scrobbled correctly - go figure. In case you're interested there are some amazing string tributes to ACDC, Black Sabbath, Mudvayne, Pink Floyd, Rush, and Slayer.

How many compilations get tagged as "Various Artists" by cddb or auto-tagging programs? I new something was wrong when the automatic Last.fm recommendation system kept recommending Various Artists to me. Oddly enough there really is a band called Various Artists who bore no similarity to anything that was in my charts.

The band Аркона I had incorrectly tagged as Arkona by Winblows Media Player because Windont didn't want to read Russian characters. Arkona is actually a polish black metal/death metal that sucks, IMO. Аркона are a good Russian pagan-metal/folk-metal band and have a really beautiful sounding singer. I had even mispelled Dream Theater as Dream Theatre on one whole album.

And then there are bands/artists like these:
Corrosion Of Conformity / COC / C.O.C.
Dirty Rotten Imbeciles / DRI / D.R.I.
Method Of Destruction / MOD / M.O.D.
Stormtroopers Of Death / SOD / S.O.D.
Indestructible Noise Command / INC / I.N.C.
Office of Strategic Influence / OSI / O.S.I.
Grotesque Through Incoherence / GTI / G.T.I.
Týr / ᛏᛣᚱ
Tarja Turunen / Tarja
Արամ Խաչատրյան / Aram Khatchaturian
Николай Римский-Корсаков / Nicolay Rimsky - Korsakov
At one point Last.fm recognized all of the variations as unique and valid artists!
And a few it still does.
Gods forbid if some fanboi sees you using the Tarja Turunen tag instead of Tarja. Get a life fanboys & girls! Some people even argue over the Týr and ᛏᛣᚱ tags. One is the band's name the other is the band's logo in runic font. Both to me are valid and are much to be preferred over Tyr which is a talentless drum & bass electronica hack.–How are you supposed to accurately tag a band who changed their name years into their career? Such as The Lord Weird Slough Feg who are now called simply Slough Feg. Or Korova who changed their name to Korovakill. What about Devin Townsend? Some of his albums are by Devin Townsend and yet others are The Devin Townsend Band.–All it would take is a simple script flag and all of those tags could point to one preferred artist page. Which would prevent a lot of the pointless arguing and flaming I've seen instigated over what is the "correct tag." Wasn't that the point behind being able to vote for the correct tag and spelling all of these months?
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So I've corrected the few misspellings, considered all of the multiple tags and chosen the ones I felt were most valid, and I no longer use an "autotag" feature when ripping compilation cds. And now begins the epic journey to rebuild my tracks played, but with only music that I like and approve of. Less of the bad and more of the good this time around. I'm going to play my music library from 0-9, A-Z as an experiment to see how long it takes - or until I get bored with that. But truthfully, I thrive on randomness and variety so I don't know how long I will be able to set through multiple hours of the same band. I can think of a few bands in which it may take days to listen to all of the albums that I have.________________________________
My TOP 10 listened to artists
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Not really my favorite bands but certainly the ones I listened to the most in 47 weeks of scrobbling.________________________________
A tag cloud of my most listened to genres:
progressive metal metal symphonic metal death metal folk metal gothic metal gothic rock thrash metal alternative experimental melodic death metal instrumental avant-garde avant-garde metal female vocalists goth progressive rock female fronted metal viking metal heavy metal black metal guitar virtuoso darkwave progressive indie
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My eclectic score was:
82/100
Which tells me less than the OpenMindIndex
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But does listening to 20+ flavors of metal really make someone "open minded"? I think it was designed to appease the genre/sub-genre fanatics.________________________________
I had one of those metal ad things also, but the designer of that thing was too limited in scope (ie: narrowminded and not eclectic enough) in order for it to realistically capture the true state of my top artists. It was a good attempt though.
http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u143/heretek/lastfmJournal/metaladknorfde.png________________________________
Artists who didn't make my top charts but are still worthy of a listen:
After Forever Amon Amarth Amorphis Angtoria Arcturus Autumn Battlelore Beseech Borknagar Children of Bodom Cynic Demons & Wizards Dimmu Borgir Draconian Edenbridge Ensiferum Epica Equilibrium Eternal Tears of Sorrow Evergrey Falkenbach Flowing Tears Fredrik Thordendal's Special Defects Green Carnation Haggard Iced Earth Kalmah Lacrimosa Lacuna Coil Leaves' Eyes Moonsorrow Moonspell Månegarm Naglfar Nevermore Nightwish Norther Old Man's Child Pain of Salvation Ram-Zet Sirenia Sonata Arctica Stream of Passion Tarja Turunen Theatre of Tragedy Trail of Tears Vintersorg Wintersun Within Temptation Xandria ________________________________
Now for an even more boring analysis of my listening habits, with pictures for the reading impaired:
I listened to 22020+ songs on my computer between May 13, 2007 and July 21, 2008. The actual time comprised was only 47 weeks since I took a few months off in there somewhere. The following charts show how much my top artists/albums/songs comprise the music I've listened to.
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The chart above summarizes how much my top 10 artists accounted for all of the music I listened to.

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In terms of artists, 12% of the music I've listened to came from my top 10 artists, 22% came from my top 25 artists, and 35% came from my top 50 artists. Approximately 65% of the music I've listened to lies outside of my top 50 artists.
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In terms of albums, 7% of the music I've listened to came from my top 10 albums, 12% came from my top 25 albums, and 18% came from my top 50 albums.
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In terms of individual songs, 1% of the music I've listenened to came from my top 10 songs. 3% came from my top 25 songs and 4% came from my top 50 songs

The Long Tail of My Music Listening Habits
The following charts show The Long Tail of how I listened to my favorite artists/albums/songs.

Let's see how many of my top artists/albums/songs it takes to account for half the number of times I've listened to my top 50 artists/albums/songs.
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My top 19 artists make up about 50% of the 7649 times I've listened to my top 50 artists. Recall that my top 50 artists account for 35% of all 22020 songs I've listened to.
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My top 17 albums make up about 50% of the 3940 times I've listened to my top 50 albums. Recall that my top 50 albums account for 18% of all 22020 songs I've listened to.
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My top 18 songs make up about 50% of the 962 times I've listened to my top 50 songs. Recall that my top 50 songs account for 4% of all 22020 songs I've listened to.