Last.fm and My Listening Habits
I think the disconnect between the music I think that I really like and what I actually listen to is interesting.
There's this great service called Last.fm that grabs what I'm listening to (via iTunes and a little helper application that I can't live without). It's how I populate that neat little bar at the bottom of my website in near real-time about what I'm listening to.
Every song that I listen to is recorded in Last.fm's database (yes, you can delete your account or even delete all you listening history, so privacy isn't an issue for me). From their website I can track my listening history and data usually doesn't lie. (Data doesn't lie, interpretations do, however)
Interesting tidbits about me:
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I listen to a lot of music — 12,476 song plays since 9 Nov 2007 — which works out to be about 38.2 songs per day or 53.3 songs per work day. Last.fm has these all aggregated for me and provides me neat little statistics about my listening habits so much so that I didn't even know how much I really liked a few bands that I listen to on a regular basis.
It's amazing what data mining and aggregation can do. It reminds me of a recent article in Wired about how the future of scientific discovery is going to be in data mining instead of theorizing.
I don't think any scientific discovery is going to come from my musical listening statistics, but hey, you never know.