Tonight I reached the arbitrary but round number of 40,000 tracks scrobbeld to Last.fm. A lot was from Spotify, but I guess a fair chunk was from Windows Media Player too.

To celebrate, I made sure that track 40,000 was Green Onions, which is my most-played track.

Looking at the statistics on Last.fm is is all a bit predictable. Although I seem to have listened to over 5,000 different artists, showing how Spotify is a great way to discover new things and broaden your horizons, a lot of those were probably ones where I listened to one track. Looking at the most-played artists there is very little that I wasn’t listening to 10 years ago. Or 20. Or even 30 years ago in many cases.

For example, the most-played artists in the last 12 months were:

1. Dr. Feelgood
2. Genesis
3. Depeche Mode
4. Yes
5. Pet Shop Boys
6. Elton John
7. The Fall
8. Public Image Ltd
9. Jethro Tull
10. Radiohead

I was a bit surprised by the last two actually. I must have had a binge on them 10 months ago or something.

The all-time most-played artists list (well. Since Feb 2009) is similar:

1. Dr. Feelgood
2. Primus
3. Yes
4. Gang of Four
5. The Fall
6. Depeche Mode
7. Genesis
8. Kraftwerk
9. Les Negresses Vertes
10. Pet Shop Boys

I think that the old me from 30 years ago would have made much better use of the ability to listen to all the new music from anywhere in the world, no matter how obscure, and would not have spent large chunks of the 21st Century listening to Argent, Focus, Genesis and Yes, though I suspect he would still have managed to get Dr. Feelgood and Gang of Four near the top of the list!