2011年 08月 29日 月曜日 21:04

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to commemorate the 4 year anniversary of one pecusita and last.fm. 4 years. Who knew it would last this long?!

Even though the written communication seems to have decreased, the psycho addiction to the numbers is still as strong as ever. Heck, I've even increased one full track to average 75 plays per day, up one from last year. We're going steady, my love.

Cold Hard Facts

Total Scrobbles
1st year - 47,036 (includes tracks scrobbled at sign up)
2nd year - 76,168 (+29,062)
3rd year - 98,209 (+22,041)
4th year - 127,105 (+28,896)

Number of artists in Library
1st year - 649 artists
2nd year - 1,119 artists (+470)
3rd year - 1,844 artists (+725)
4th year - 2,816 (+972)

As you can see both stats have gained significantly, up 77.26% for scrobbles and 65.48% for artists! Just like I mentioned before, a steady stat profit increase. Yes, I still use blip.fm quite a bit. To this date I have 1,379 listeners; 7,507 blips; 6,767 props. That's +679 listeners, +4,207 blips, +5,067 props! I'm also sporting a shiny 1K badge *ahem*.

Just a few weeks ago, a new friend entered our circle: Spotify. We are still in our "introduction" stage, but I've already pulled the trigger and upgraded to Premium, which incidentally has made our relationship a bit rockier in the past couple of days. Ah, money. Always getting in the way of love.

At this very moment, it's still too early to determine whether we'll be able to overcome these new challenges in our relationship. We still have about 27 days to work this out or I'll be forced to ask Spotify to move out and go back to our less exclusive relationship. You see, to me the whole point of Premium is to use it on-the-go and sync tracks for offline playing. So, what's the problem? If you want Spotify on your device, you cannot use iTunes and you have to start syncing local tracks with WiFi. That I did not know. It's like I asked for its past history, it said life was great then, after moving in, revealed it had 3 ex-wives and 7 kids. Painful. On top of that, their app is not as great as iTunes, though mind you I have not been able to use the iPod Touch version… because of Spotify. *sigh* Oh the other hand, I no longer have to listen to 30 seconds of that annoying "Gucci Gucci" song so that's something.

As for last.fm, not much has changed in the past year. Or as my mind really sees it: nothing has improved. Our new friend makes me even more reliant on last.fm, considering that you don't get play stats from Spotify and with its built-in scrobbler I don't have to rely so much on Universal Scrobbler to keep those stats as OCD-perfect as possible. If anyone out there reading this in cyberspace is interested in a Spotify invite, message me. I've got a few!

Anyhoo, do you remember library themes? We got 5 more of them!

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5247/5215107587_56bc60ee05.jpg

Love the woods all around us.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5003/5215107845_877c7c052b.jpg

Mysterious guys making mysterious music.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5286/5215699666_005347d1aa.jpg

We understand the need of compensating low exposure with slow speeds and we choose to ignore tripods.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5246/5235520697_7e4f80ee45.jpg

We listen to music and we think of colors.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2022/5791662223_cf28eca24d.jpg

Smoking allowed in last.fm libraries.

Artist charts

The week following our last anniversary was topped by Menomena with 80 plays. The most dominating week was March 27, when Deftones took the top spot with 338 plays! The only other artist to put on such an eye whopping amount of plays was Explosions in the Sky, who had 206 plays in the week of April 10. Most other artists have dominated with around 100 plays or way less.

Interestingly enough, March 27 was the only week Deftones dominated the charts but kept a strong recurring role in other positions to gain quite a bit in the overall charts. They haven't quite made it to the 1000+ club, though, currently seating at #26 with 957 plays. No need to fret. Since last year's journal things have gotten quite crowded in that club. There are currently 25 artists with over 1,000 scrobbles, with the additions of the likes of Explosions in the Sky, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Deerhunter, These New Puritans, Errors and Slaraffenland. Congrats to all of them!

Meanwhile, Menomena made it into the even more exclusive 5000 club, sitting at #2 with 5,318 plays. While The Kills beat their guitars past Xiu Xiu to take hold of the #3 spot with 3,398 plays. The Besnard Lakes are threatening to join The Walkmen in the 2000+ any minute now. They have 1,990 plays for the #6 spot. Other artists that are sure to join them soon are Mogwai and M83, who are sitting at #9 and #10 with 1,873 and 1,658 plays respectively. With old timers The Smiths and, newer but a bit stalled at the moment, Arctic Monkeys rounding up with 1900+. This is almost as exciting as a horse race!

These are the artists who have dominated the charts in the past year:

One week
Villagers
Tame Impala
Warpaint
Owen Pallett
The Walkmen
Xiu Xiu
The National
The Phantom Band
Anna Calvi
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Deftones
The Stone Roses
James Blake
Suuns
Lykke Li
Black Sabbath
Maybeshewill
The Radio Dept.
Mogwai
Planningtorock

Two weeks
Deerhunter
Flying Lotus
Wild Nothing
Lower Dens
Explosions in the Sky
Austra

Three weeks
These New Puritans
The Velvet Underground

Four weeks
The Kills
The Smiths

And our most recurrently dominating artist was…

Menomena!
Five weeks at the top. Most plays on October 10th with 155 plays.

Most Dominating Songs
A fun feature of these journals. On its third year, you can start calling it a recurring feature.

15. Explosions in the Sky – Greet Death
16 plays - April 10, 11

Don't know if you were aware of this, but this song has a mind blower of an intro! Also the fastest guitar part I've witnessed in concert, at least I believe there was a hand playing guitar back in SummerStage '09. It was a blur. Even though common sense tells me there had to be a hand there, I could not provide an eye witness account under oath.

14. James Blake – Unluck
18 plays - April 24, 11

Well, I must say that some broken records appear not to sound so broken after a dozen and a half plays.

13. Wavves – King of the Beach
20 plays - August 29, 10

Even not the biggest fans of pop rock need their upbeat rock songs to get by….

12. Austra – Beat and the Pulse
21 plays - June 26, 11

… while in reality what I enjoy the most are dramatic songs like this one. Feel. It… Breeeeeeaaaak.

11. The Velvet Underground – Sunday Morning
21 plays - March 20, 11

Hmm. Surprised about this one. I'm personally much a bigger fan of songs like Run, Run, Run or I'm Waiting For My Man. I can definitely tell you I was listening to a lot of old music around that time.

10. Women – Drag Open
22 plays - May 1, 11

Whoa! This one-two punch is a complete coincidence. Serendipity!

09. Dead Man's Bones – Lose Your Soul
25 plays - January 16, 11

Another year, another song. Stop it! I know you're never coming out with another album. Might as well break-up now.

08. Panda Bear – Tomboy
26 plays - May 8, 11

Broken records. Yada-yada. Otherworldly qualities. Yada-yada. 26 plays.

07. Menomena – Shirt
29 plays - May 22, 11

One thing my Top 3 last.fm artists have in common is that I really like a lot of their b-side material. I wonder what that could possibly mean…

07. Deftones – Prince
29 plays - March 27, 11

Ah, the sound of a long-lost love returning to my charts in a big fashion. See above overall artist rant.

05. Warpaint – Elephants
35 plays - June 19, 11

Again, slow-building, syllable-stretching drama.

04. The Smiths – This Charming Man
40 plays - April 3

Another golden oldie! Takes me back to the last Morrissey gig I attended.

03. These New Puritans – C. 16th ±
45 plays - May 15, 11

One thing you can say out Beat Pyramid is the songs are too freaking short, you just feel like you have to replay them to get a full 4m30s effect. It's trueeeee!

02. Menomena – Queen Black Acid
52 plays - July 10, 11

Top notch slow dancing jam. First couple of plays I wasn't so thrilled with it, eventually I came around. I guess that's what you could call such amount of plays in a 7 day period.

01. The Kills – Getting Down
53 plays - January 23, 11

I knew this song was addictive but darns it! I checked the artist stats for that week, in case it was a scrobbler gone haywire bug, but as it turns out they weren't even #1 that week. Say whaaaaat.

Journals
In the past year, I've added 13 more journal entries. Even though it appears to be an increase over last year's 10 journals, a lot of them merely had any rant in it. *sigh* I feel like our first year's feat of 30 journals will never be repeated. Let's see what happens next year.

One hit
The following group had at least one song worth noting.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
Belle and Sebastian
Born Ruffians
Cameras
Crystal Castles
Dum Dum Girls
Foals
Glasser
Hidden Orchestra
Holly Miranda
Holy Fuck
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
LCD Soundsystem
Lower Dens
Panda Bear
Perfume Genius
Plants and Animals
Salem
The Knife
The Mynabirds
Twin Sister
Wolf Parade
Wye Oak
Zola Jesus
Favorite Songs of 2010 - Dec 8

Two hits
The following group was mentioned in the songs and most played album journals.

Arcade Fire
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Dum Dum Girls
Local Natives
Spoon
Toro y Moi
Wild Nothing
Most Played Albums of 2010 - Jan 10
Favorite Songs of 2010 - Dec 8

Trifecta!
The following group was mentioned in the songs, albums and most played journals. Winners!

Beach House
The Besnard Lakes
The Black Keys
Caribou
Deerhunter
Flying Lotus
Gorillaz
Menomena
Owen Pallett
Phantogram
The Phantom Band
The National
Tame Impala
These New Puritans
Twin Shadow
Villagers
The Walkmen
Warpaint
Women
Xiu Xiu
Favorite Songs of 2010 - Dec 8
Most Played Albums of 2010 - Jan 10
Favorite Albums of 2010 - Dec 16

Concert Memories
Since last year, I've attended a measly 8 gigs, only two of them inspired my fingers to get off their lazy selfs.

Explosions in the Sky
Low
Eluvium
Explosions in the Sky @ Radio City Music Hall - Apr 7

Menomena
Suckers
Tu Fawning
Menomena! @ Webster Hall - Oct 3

Play Stats Recounts
Presented without much artist specific comments, hence the lack of artist link.

Most played mid-2011 - Jun 1
EPs, Songs, Concerts of 2010 - Apr 7
100,000th scrobble extravaganza - Sept 19

Playlists
The state of the female gender in indie: the Spotify playlist! - 23 Jul
Playlist: Disco for the Holidays! - Dec 17
Oh, Baby: The Mixtape - Nov 13

So, a quick look will give you a hint of who was the "most talked about" artist of the past year… Menomena! (Shocker!) They were included in all recap journals corresponding to 2010 AND they also had a concert so awesome that I had to write about it. You could say they were on my mind a lot.

I guess that's it for now. Let's hope for more stats next year. x

Past Anniversary Journals
Three
Two
One (Awwww. Feels so long ago)