My Most Scrobbled Artists by Rhyner

From RoundTheBend 04/23/2024 05:27

And yes as time goes on, we now have 40 in common (just updated my chart and re-read your comment when it was 33).

From Rhyner 04/11/2021 20:20

Go right ahead. I have no patent on the idea, and even if I did I would happily cede it to the public domain.

From Purplepash 04/10/2021 23:13

Cool idea - do you mind if I copy it?

From RoundTheBend 03/25/2021 01:36

First off - thanks for inspiring me to make my list! It's somehow cooler here than on Last.FM.

But yeah I hear you. I wish I started scrobbling when I was like 8 years old. That'd be a trip to see (and probably would be more accurate to your point of music you most enjoy), instead of just the last few years of more "examined life" listening.

RE: Trout Mask Replica, you know I've had that experience before - wanting to like/believe a record was great (believe it or not Bowie's Ziggy Stardust was that album for me... like I thought Bowie was good, but struggled on the GREAT side of things, so I listened to that a bunch and then was like - meh! BUT then like 3 years later I picked it up, and just like Pavlov's dog, I salivated a little... hehe - so perhaps TMR will do that for you?

RE: Classical
Cool to see Beethoven climb 20 spots or so. But yes, I think if I had the soundtrack of my life from age 8 on, it's still have A LOT of Mahler on there because my brother was obsessed. But perhaps not as much as I have it now. That listening project was pretty intense/pretty deep dives into composers I'd never heard and "really" deep dives into the ones I did. So it is a bit skewed... I'm not THAT much into classical. Probably 10 of those composers would still make my top 100, but a good chunk would likely fall off.

RE: R.E.M. & U2
How dare you! hehe. Nah, I have an intimate relationship with parts of those bands, and anyone who listens to them "regularly" earn my respect immediately somehow because it. And if they don't, they usually end up with it too. hehe - but still fantastic taste in general, and not just because of REM/U2.

From Rhyner 03/24/2021 05:08

Thanks! You've inspired me to update this. It was growing pretty inaccurate. You may notice that R.E.M. has dropped out of the top ten and U2 slipped 12 places, so feel free to adjust your rating accordingly. :)

Seriously though, I do think this updated version is a better representation of my taste. Maybe it's weird, but I don't listen mostly to music that I really like. Instead, for the time that I've been invested into seriously exploring the world of music (which is really just the past twelve years or so), I've basically been familiarizing myself with the "canon". So there are several artists that don't really do that much for me, like Kanye West, Neil Young, or The Who, who on this list place quite highly relative to where I would put them if this were just a ranking of my favorite artists. (I'm not saying I dislike those artists. I just don't like them nearly as much as their placement on this list might have you believe.)

And then there's weird stuff like Captain Beefheart. I don't like Captain Beefheart, yet he was in the top ten of the old version, and he's still in the top twenty. This is because there was a period when I was trying to "get" Trout Mask Replica, so I listened to it something like twenty or thirty times. My conclusion? Not for me. At all. You'd think that would be apparent after I didn't enjoy it the first few listens, but for some reason I insisted on punishing myself repeatedly in the hopes that I would eventually find it rewarding. That never happened. So I don't like seeing Captain Beefheart on this list, and I will consider it a great victory when the day comes that I can finally remove him from it. Every song I listen to that isn't by Captain Beefheart brings me one step closer to that victory. Consulting my scrobble history, it looks like I haven't subjected myself to the aural assault that is Trout Mask Replica since April 2019. Nearly two years. Hm... Maybe I'd feel differently about it now? (Sadly, it's inevitable that I will revisit it at some point, because I still hold onto a tiny sliver of hope that the stars will align, everything will click, and Trout Mask Replica will finally open up to me and reveal the masterful work of art that others claim to hear. But I genuinely don't think it ever will, so any revisits will just be painful backslides on the arduous path toward my goal of eliminating ol' Cappy from this list.)

Long story short, just because an artist is on this list doesn't necessarily say anything about my enjoyment of their music, although I do generally enjoy most of what's here. But things are improving. For the past couple years, I've been expanding my listening journey deeper into the niches of musicdom that most appeal to me, and the results are evident in some of the changes in this version of the list. I think that trend will only become more pronounced in the future. Which is not to say that I've exhausted my examination of the "canon". But that pursuit is increasingly taking up less and less of my music-listening time.

The future is bright.

From RoundTheBend 03/23/2021 05:38

Fun list - good taste :)