Today, after scrobbling some tracks to Last.fm I decided to check my profile thereon, and see how my list of top 10 artists looked.

The first two didn’t phase me; I knew they’d be Apoptygma Berzerk and Belle & Sebastian, two of my absolute favourite bands.  What did surprise me, however, was that -M- was in third place, albeit only by one song.  I’ve only been listening to -M- for a few months (since June roughly, so 5 months now?)  whereas I’ve been listening to the previous holder of third place–The Beatles–for about as long as you might expect anyone to have been doing so.

I decided to look at how many songs I owned by -M-, and how long it’d take to listen to them all (since iTunes readily offers that information up) and was astounded that I owned over 8 hours of his music. (I still haven’t collected all of his albums; I’m missing two live ones and the one that will be released in just under two weeks.)

After that I decided to compare the amount of music I had of each of the artists in first, second and third place, just for curiosity’s sake. (I was wondering if perhaps the only reason any given artist had a higher play count was because I had more songs by them.) 3rd place (-M-) was posted above.

Here’s 2nd place (Belle & Sebastian):

If you’re wondering about the difference in file size (you probably aren’t) the reason that more B&S songs take up less space is because all my -M- songs are ripped from CDs in Apple Lossless format, whereas my B&S songs are bought on the iTunes Store.  I plan to eventually purchase all the B&S albums on CD, but… I just have yet to get around to it.

Next is 1st place (Apoptygma Berzerk):

A whopping 1.5 days worth of music, 15.46 GBs — Now to be fair, a lot of these are duplicate songs, whereas only two of the -M- songs are duplicates, and none of the B&S ones are.  The reason for the duplicates is that I … got kind of stuck on APB for a while, and ended up purchasing every album and single they’ve released.  I then decided it was a great idea to rip all of those, and put them in my iTunes library.  I own 4 copies of their album “7″, because there was the first Norwegian release, the subsequent US release, the US re-release, and the German re-release.  They all have slightly different tracklists and some feature bonus tracks, some have had the tracks changed due to copyright reason… it’s a very long story.

Anyway, let’s get “Back on Track” again (that’s an APB joke, don’t worry about it).

I looked further into the matter, and realized that the top 10 standings on Last.fm have more to do with my scrobbling habits than my lifetime listens; I somehow sort of forgot that I’ve listened to The Beatles way more than 801 times; I’ve simply only listened to them for 801 times since I started using Last.fm again in 2010/2011. (I signed up for it in 2004 when it was Audioscrobbler, used it, quit it, started again in 2008, stopped again, started late 2010/early 2011, and have been going strong ever since.)

For completion’s sake, here’s the totals of the rest of the top 10 artists I’ve listened to (in order, yay!):

• The Beatles – 265 items, 12.3 hours, 2.01 GB: 801 Scrobbles
• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - 169 items, 10.4 hours, 4.21 GB: 503 Scrobbles
• The Waking Eyes – 35 items, 2.1 hours, 907.1 MB: 488 Scrobbles
• Neil Diamond – 119 items, 7.2 hours, 2.22 GB: 394 Scrobbles
• Sean Lennon – 15 items, 55.3 minutes, 353.3 MB: 284 Scrobbles
• Justin Timberlake – 14 items, 1.2 hours, 500.8 MB: 264 Scrobbles
• Paul McCartney – 18 items, 1 hour, 301.5 MB: 247 Scrobbles