Tracking my habits

For those who don't know, Audioscrobbler offers plugins to most major media players that sends data to their server about songs that you listen to. They then build up a personal profile of your listening tastes, and can do funky things like telling you, "other people who listen to $foo and $bar also like $baz".

It sounded good to me when I came across it, and so on November 22nd of last year, I installed the iTunes plugin, and then promptly forgot about it completely.

Today, however, I was lamenting my loss of play counts and ratings in iTunes since the last time I reinstalled Windows, and Audioscrobbler popped into my mind. Curious, I went and looked up my profile, and found it very scary indeed after seven months of data-accumulation (not least because I'd half-forgotten what it was for).

That's the song that just finished playing! And the ones before that! Hmm, according to my artist stats for last week I have a thing for Buddy Holly at the moment (actually, I knew this). And, heh, I'm Shannon Campbell's biggest (Audioscrobbler) fan by a long way... Oh, and Clair added me as a friend at some point, meaning that she realised I was a member before I did :-)

I'm currently resisting adding a "now playing" list to bent back tulips...

One track that definitely wouldn't have shown up in my Audioscrobbler statistics is Bat Out Of Hell. I've played it once in the last four years or so. Not because I dislike the song, but because it is sheer magnificence. Since shortly after I first discovered it, I've maintained a policy of actively avoiding listening to it for a long, long time between plays, so that its impact wouldn't be dulled through familiarity on the day when I finally decided to listen to it again.

Today was one such day. And even though I knew I hadn't heard the song in something approaching at least two years, I was still amazed by the effect it had on me — a casual observer would have seen me sitting plugged into my headphones, eyes closed and a grin of delight on my face provoked my the music I was listening to. There were occasional goosebumps too (headphones is the only way to go with this song).

Superb. I'll probably listen to it again sometime in 2007.