The little “Studio Monitor” gizmo over there in the left-hand column shows what I’ve been listening to. If you click it, you can get more details, if you care. It comes from LastFM, a social music site. A user downloads a small piece of software, which keeps track of what the user is playing on the computer, as long as the user has an open Internet connection. (I will have been a user for two years next week.) LastFM doesn’t keep track of everything—if the software isn’t working, the computer isn’t connected to the web, or I’m using a computer without the software, as I was during my laptop crisis a month ago, nothing gets reported—but it surely provides anybody who might care to look a decent picture of what I’m into.
The picture of what I’m into is decent, but not necessarily complete. I have transferred some of my favorite CDs to the laptop stash, but not everything by my favorite artists. So people like Steely Dan are a bit underrepresented, since most of my Dan has been acquired on CD. It’s likely that Van Morrison is overrepresented, since most of my Van has been downloaded. I had only a handful of Steely Dan tracks on the computer for the longest time until I acquired a bunch of bootlegs, and I really ought to rip the whole Steely Dan oeuvre. And everything by Boz Scaggs. And Elton John. And Mary Chapin Carpenter, Rosanne Cash, and others, but I haven’t done it yet.
Some of the features of the LastFM software include rolling three-month, six-month, and one-year charts. Since we just wrapped up the first quarter of the year, I thought it might be interesting to check out my rolling three-month chart for 2008 so far:
Top Artists:
1. Van Morrison
2. Fleetwood Mac
3. Jimmy Smith
4. Rolling Stones
5. (tie) Paul McCartney and Wings, Jimmy McGriff
7. Eric Clapton
8. Lucinda Williams
9. Boz Scaggs
10. Three Dog Night
Smith and McGriff are Hammond B3 jazz players. I love me some B3.
Top Albums:
1. Greatest Hits Live/Boz Scaggs
2. 20 Greatest Hits/Archies
3. Mirage/Fleetwood Mac
4. (tie) Chronicles (1968-1984)/Dave Edmunds, The Complete Hit Singles/Three Dog Night
6. (tie) Venus and Mars/Paul McCartney and Wings, The Sound of Christmas/Ramsey Lewis
8. Let it Be/Beatles
9. Urban Cowboy/Various Artists (soundtrack)
10. five albums tied
Since Ramsey Lewis is in there, the rolling three-month charts must include the last week of December, too. In any event, I would never have guessed that the live Boz album would be the one I’d heard most often since the first of the year. Placement on this list can have a lot to do with the size of an album, I’m sure. Play something with 20 or more tracks one time through and it’s likely to rank pretty high after three months because I usually play my music on shuffle, and in that mode, any particular track or album isn’t likely to get on very often. In two years, my most-played tracks (plural, because there are five of them) have played only 15 times each.
Playing in shuffle mode makes exploring the charts pretty interesting sometimes. For example, six of my most-played albums of the last two years, a cut here and a cut there, are jazz records by Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, Bobby Hutcherson, Smith, and Gary Burton, but the top two are Morph the Cat by Donald Fagen and The Complete Greatest Hits by America.
The Complete Greatest Hits by America?
“Sandman”/America (buy it here)
Filed under: Record Charts, Tracks
