2007 in Music
10 January 2008
Filed under Life, Music, Text
I’ve just created a smart playlist in iTunes simply titled ‘2007’, which has the following criteria:
- Date added is after 31/12/2006
- Date added is before 01/01/2008
- Play count is greater than 3
It gives me a rough overview of the music I listened to (as opposed to downloading and discarding) in 2007, or at least it will until future listenings skew the playcounts*, and it allows me to provide the following fascinating statistical analysis:
- ‘The Con’ (Tegan and Sara) was by far my favourite album of 2007, with a massive 38 plays
- ‘Back to Black’ (Amy Winehouse) got high rotation until I no longer wished to be reminded of her emaciated, drug-abused self
- Pavarotti’s death was good for his popularity among the not-quite-youth of today
- Keith Jarrett can pretty much release the same album every year and I’ll buy it and play it and love it
- Kate Ceberano hasn’t been out of my Top 100 for 17 years
- Sabrina Dinan’s 20-minute set supporting Luka Bloom at Port Fairy was good enough that I purchased the bootleg (if one can, in fact, purchase a bootleg) and listened to it another 20 times
- Chris Potter’s performance with Dave Holland at Wangaratta made me want to have his babies, despite the fact that (as TMWQ points out), he looks like a science teacher**
New to me (or, in some cases, new to my iTunes) in 2007 were: Joanna Newsom, The National, Arvo Part, Puccini, Lily Allen, Spoon, Ned Collette, Arcade Fire, Aleks and the Ramps, Sime Nugent, Francoiz Breut and Plastic Palace Alice. Old(er) favourites with new (to me) albums were Feist, Radiohead, Keith Jarrett, Paul Grabowsky, Crowded House, Chris Potter, Dave Holland, Pat Metheny, Brad Mehldau, Carla Bruni***, Ornette Coleman, The Shins
In all: 351 songs, or 2.38 GB, or 1 day, of music, which doesn’t count the forays I made into the other inventor’s capacious shared iTunes library, or various failed experiments with MC Solar and Benjamin Britten (not simultaneously). Bring on 2008.
UPDATE: Oh my god, I totally forgot - my ACTUAL favourite song in 2007 was Casey Bennetto singing Susannah Chambers’s Geelong-themed lyrics to Hallelujah. It still tears me up. If you’re the kind of Geelong supporter who won’t dob Sus and Casey into Leonard Cohen, email me and I’ll shoot you over a copy.
* There are two options I’d like to see in iTune. One of them is the ability to see play counts for tracks over a particular period, so that I can graph the spikes of obsessiveness in my listening, like the week I listened to The Con twenty-four times (unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t currently store this information - it just stores play count and date of last listening). The other is a way of limiting a playlist to complete albums, so that I don’t think that I’m carrying around the whole of The Con when I fact I only have three tracks from it. While Apple’s at it, I’d like to be able to use Cover Flow on my Touch to browse a playlist by album.
** That’s not at all statistical, I realise. But Mike is the only person who’ll notice.
*** Yes, the non-monogamous hot lady-friend of the right-wing French president. That Carla Bruni.
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Views from the Floor
Huw says:
Am I right that the top single of 2006 was Ben Folds singing Bitches Aint Shit?
Sus' Hallelujah still brings tears to my eyes.
Virginia says:
I think you're probably right about 2006 and Bitches Ain't Shit. It's still well up there in my 'most played' in iTunes. I do love it so. It's embarrassing... along with It's Easy Mmmkay, and The Internet is for Porn.
rothko says:
I try to ignore my stats. That way I can forget the fact that I put Casey Dienel's "Frankie and Annette" on repeat one and listened to it 17 times in a row. Sometimes I find it's best to deny my obsessiveness.
Adrian says:
Have you tried setting up an account on last.fm and scrobbling your tracks? That way, you can at least get some rolling statistics about your itunes playing? (it also collects stats about your ipod listening habits, if you've got one lying around).
Virginia says:
Yeah, I use Last.fm - it's great. I guess I'd like more of that kind of gear in iTunes though.
Speak, friend, and enter