Here’s something I haven’t done in awhile – let’s take a look at my iTunes. Aside from the radio, I obsessively listen to music through iTunes and my iPod (to the extent that it probably curtails my discovery of new music). And I still use a custom shuffling script that I wrote several years ago to keep my music interesting & fresh (or at least not repeating too often), which means that songs oldies I like I continue to listen to. All of this means that I have a record of what songs I’ve been listening to since around 2003 or so on iTunes (well through last.fm too, but that’s another story). I took a look in 2005 to see what songs I listened to the most, let’s see how that’s changed in 5 years.

Not much. Most of the songs that I was listening to frequently before are still on the chart, with their #s increased by 75%. A couple of new entries as well, which is expected. You know in the last 6 years I’ve spent over 12 hours of it listening to Coldplay’s Talk?

Some strangeness though, why have I spent 11 hours listening to Celine Dion’s It’s All Coming Back To Me Now or Aqua’s Turn Back Time? I don’t even remember the last time I heard them.

It might be interesting to see what new music I’ve been listening to since 2005. Surprisingly it’s a wide variety. I expected to see a lot of John Mayer, Shins, Franz Ferdinand, Arcade Fire etc but they are actually not that prominent in this list!

How about since in the last 3 years? I’d expect the Cardigans & Dido to show up a lot.

But it turns out I’ve been listening to a lot of CSS instead. In the past few years I haven’t added much new music (although I’ve added a lot of “oldies” to my library). It’s likely that most of the songs on this list is unrecognizable to you!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: datamining, itunes, music, obsessivecompulsive