Today marks 20 years since I got my first iPod and downloaded iTunes, kicking off a digital music journey that's still going strong. Despite switching from PC to Mac, and various other laptop changes, my digital library has remained mostly intact. So, while others are sharing their Spotify 'Wrapped' recaps, I'm celebrating with my own music data deep-dive. Scroll to the end for the infographic I created!
I don't write about music very often but you can still find posts in my archives about my favourite bands, gigs I've attended and some historical music data analysis.
I've spent many hours cleaning up and standardising the metadata on all the songs in my library over the years. But my history of cataloguing my music collection goes back way further.
The first album I owned was Now Dance 1994 — quite how I got into dance music at such a young age given that no one else in my family likes it remains a mystery! My first CD single was One and One by Robert Miles (#263) in November 1996. A week or so later, I received Spice by the Spice Girls and Coming Up by Suede for my birthday — I like one of these bands *a little* more than the other these days!
Around the same time, I got into the UK Top 40 charts: two hours per day on the school bus meant a lot of exposure to Radio 1. I started recording my edited highlights of the Top 40 each week on cassette. As a result, I still have an encyclopaedic knowledge of UK chart music from 1996 to 2001. The same is true for late 1990s and early 2000s dance and trance music.
I also used to make regular lists of my top five songs in my diary (cringe!). Later, I started making a mixtape with my current favourite songs every month until I got an mp3 player for my 17th birthday in 2000. The Rio 600's tiny 32MB capacity meant I was constantly reprioritising the handful of songs that would fit, but I never looked back.
As for the mixtapes, none of them stood the test of time; I wish I'd saved one! If you've only lived in the digital music era, it's hard to understand what an absolute pain it was to track down a song you heard briefly on the radio. There was, of course, no Shazam and when the Internet was much more limited, you couldn't even search for select lyrics online.
But this did mean that when you finally managed to find the song, the serendipitous pleasure was immense. I had the melody of Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight (#386) in my head for over a decade without being able to find it until it featured in The Last of Us last year!
Identifying lyrics was just as tricky. I bought some albums specifically to have access to song lyrics. And I once sent a very polite email to British DJ Lange in 2000 asking him for the lyrics to Follow Me (#66). He replied just as politely! CD singles were expensive when I only had a little bit of pocket money — albums even more so. I had to be very selective of the songs I really wanted to own — in a time when I was otherwise at the mercy of Radio 1 or MTV as to when I might next get to hear them.
I have a number of playlists that record where I first came across certain songs. Working part-time in an Oxford sandwich shop in the early 2000s was a big source of music discovery for me. The limited selection of CDs on endless repeat got me into Phoenix, The Stone Roses, Tom McRae, The Beach soundtrack, and various 1960s, 1980s and Bossa Nova hits. Then, at university, my tastes expanded further, from friends' parties to college ents and crappy Cambridge club nights.
And of my current library, the biggest sources of all are the TV shows Dawson's Creek and The O.C. The pop and alternative artists in the former really spoke to me and I loved artists like Death Cab for Cutie, Guster, Bloc Party and Imogen Heap that were favoured by Seth Cohen et al. 13 of my all-time top 50 most played songs featured in The O.C., including the top three: Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley, Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap and For the Widows in Paradise... by Sufjan Stevens.
Since 2004, I've tuned in regularly Radio Paradise, a listener-supported radio station based in Paradise, California, which plays an eclectic stream of human-curated music. Some segues include songs with a similar sound, while others share a common theme (rainy-day songs, for instance). It remains a delightful alternative to streaming algorithms.
I was at university when I first created my iTunes music library on 30 November 2004. The photo below was taken in my Cambridge college room two weeks earlier — my laptop didn't know what was about to hit it! Of that initial import, 936 songs remain in my library. New York by U2 (#2041) is technically the first song added but that was more of an alphabetical quirk of the bulk add. My library now stretches to 2,519 songs — I periodically cull songs and albums that have both a low rating and very low play count.
My library now has 20 years of data on my most-played songs, most-played artists, artists with the most songs, most popular genres and much more. There's definitely some data missing — songs I know I've listened to within the past year show as 'last played' in 2013, for example. I wish I had more time-linked data to drill down into which songs I listen to most per decade.
In case you'd like to listen along, I made a Spotify playlist with my all-time top 100 most played songs (technically songs 1 to 102, minus two that don't appear in Spotify: Hallelujah by Imogen Heap (#31) and The End's Not Near by Band of Horses (#34)). Yes, I do use Spotify occasionally!
Unsurprisingly, most of my 100 most-played songs are tunes I discovered in the 2000s — longest ago (in my digital era, at least), and a time when I listened to music a lot more. When I download a new song now, even if I really love it and binge-play it for weeks, it's really hard for it to climb too high up my ranks. Case in point: I rarely listen to my all-time most played song (Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley) these days, but I listened to it so much from 2005 to 2010 that it will probably never lose its title.
The 'date and time added' information is also interesting. For some songs, I see the date and remember exactly where or why I first liked a song enough to add it to my library. I know whose room I was in when I fell for Where You End by Moby (#64). Equally, the time stamps reveal those times when I loved a song so much that I had to pay £1.99 to download it at 2:15 am on a Friday — yes, this means you, Ada by The National (#351).
Cost has also influenced my data. Even in the digital era, it was relatively expensive to download a whole album. So, if I really liked a song, I would usually just buy the single — and perhaps one or two others from the album if I liked the sound of the preview. Although I still own most of my music, I have Apple Music, which makes it easy to add whole albums to my library. This means artists I like now tend to have more songs in my library, but a lower average play count per song.
My love of categorisation and metadata perfection has also pre-empted some changes Apple has made to iTunes (now Apple Music). Before there was an option to add lyrics to songs, I used to add 5–10 topic or mood keywords for my very favourite songs, so that I could easily make thematic playlists. (This was inspired by The Guardian's Readers Recommend column (RIP)). Eventually, Apple allowed you to add lyrics too (I did!) and now you can pull in lyrics for most songs from their own database. Progress!
I also use the smart playlist feature to create playlists like: 'Unloved Gems' (rated 4/5 or 5/5 and played between 30 and 100 times), 'Not Played in Over a Decade' and 'To Be Deleted' (fewer than 3 players, rated 2/5 or 1/5).
Seeing three of my favourite bands — Suede, Bloc Party and The National — in concert was a real highlight this year. I've been a fan since 1996, 2005 and 2008, respectively and yes, I'm a creature of habit when it comes to music. With work, life and the advent of podcasts, I have less time to listen to music these days and when I do, I want to listen to my most loved songs and artists.
Somewhere along the way, I decided that the music I listen to said a lot about me as a person. I once lent my Rio 600 mp3 player to my friend in the hope that she'd play my carefully selected playlist to the boy I liked on her school bus and that he'd realise what an amazing person I was. Spoiler alert: this did not transpire.
And I still attribute my perpetual singledom to the fact that it may be impossible to find someone else who would want to walk down the aisle to The Wild Ones by Suede (#70) and have Set You Free by N-Trance (#44) for the first dance. Then again, episodes 8 and 10 of the new One Day TV adaptation did almost that (the soundtrack to the whole show is incredible, but especially episode 10), so you never know...
Although I'm not a luddite in most areas, I'm sure I'll be one of the last holdouts to resist yielding my painstakingly curated library to the streaming overlords. If you made it this far, thank you for reading my ramblings. I hope you enjoy my infographic (there's a high-res version here)!
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