I’ll confess - I am addicted. I am a last.fm addict.

It’s not for the “neighbours” or the horrid forums, or the excruciating slowness that is the loading of any page on the site. I could care less about their reccomended music, or the fact that they can actually stream music to you.

What fascinates me about last.fm, quite simply, is myself. I’ve been listening to music non stop for at least 7 years now, and I have almost all of the music I listen to on my computer. There are those bands which I consider to be favorites, and those bands who I don’t like to admit I even have their mp3’s. And yet, until now, I had no way to quantify this. Last.fm will keep a record of every song I play, when I played it, and how many other times I listened to it.

For example, I apparently listened to The Decemberists 169 times last week. Now, I like the decemberists. But, to listen to them 169 times? In a week? They are by no means in my top 10 overall, yet the only other people that came close to them last week was Snow Patrol. This is odd, because I don’t really like Snow Patrol. It was merely music I put on to go to sleep to. (Note: I don’t actively dislike snow patrol. But to call myself fond of them would be something of a mistake - I have not actually listened to them enough to form any solid opinion).

I tend to listen to music in something of an overkill fashion. I will “aquire” new music, based on reccomendations, hearing a piece of a song, or simply random selection. Then, I will listen to it. This tends to end in one of two ways - either I immediately delete the music, as it was simply so crappy (or perhaps completely outside my tastes) that I knew I would never listen to it, or I listen to it an incredibly large amount of times over the next few weeks.  This tends to send my last.fm profile rather out of whack, when I compare it to where I tend to rank bands.   Anything new and decent will dominate my charts for a few weeks, in time fading into it’s proper place.

And, until last.fm, I never really noticed.

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