freeform goodness

I’ve been using last.fm for almost 11 years now. Primarily, I use it as a statistical database of my listening habits, or at least the portion of my listening that happens on internet connected devices / services.

Of course, last.fm is useful for more than just cataloguing your listening habits. It’s a streaming radio service, a community site for talking about music and more. For me, though, it’s always been most amusing as the place where I can go to remind myself what I was listening to 5 years ago, or which songs I’ve listened to most, or whatever. For example, I found myself wondering how many songs I listen to in a day on days when I work at home. 40 lines of Python later (including whitespace 😉 and reasonable exception handling) and I had my answer.

Some facts:

• Assuming an average song length of 5 minutes, 100000 songs would mean 49.6 weeks of continuous listening.
• The web interface won’t show me the very first song I ever scrobbled. The earliest I can find a record of is “Lighthouse” by Amon Tobin, from May 15, 2005, over two years after I joined the service.
• I can’t remember who turned me on to last.fm. It may have been Dan Sicko; it seems like the sort of thing he would have been all over early.
• My 100,000th scrobble was the full 39:58 minute version of the Orb’s “Blue Room”, which I’ve scrobbled 31 times -- first on the 31st of March, 2006.

:: 15:57
:: /entertainment/music | [+]
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