I usually use a bit of Last.fm data and Spotify’s year in review-feature to brag about my fantastic taste in music. But this year, Spotify is lagging a bit behind schedule on getting the data online. Either that, or they’ve decided to not do it in 2016. No need to worry, though, because the great minds at Last.fm has decided to go all in with their own Your Year in Music feature.

And what a great job they’ve done. Beautiful data everywhere!

According to Last.fm, my top 50 artists for 2016 were Lonely The Brave, Nothing But Thieves, Biffy Clyro, Sync24, Bersarin Quartett, Aes Dana, Astropilot, Black Foxxes, Solar Fields, Brian Eno, GoGo Penguin, Tycho, Hol Baumann, Nils Frahm, Ben Lukas Boysen, Asura, H.U.V.A. Network, The Midnight, Hammock, Kent, Mutemath, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Nujabes, FM-84, Hidden Orchestra, HVOB, All Tvvins, Ulrich Schnauss, I Awake, Moderat, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Boards of Canada, The Weeknd, Circular, Coldplay, Koan, Frank Sinatra, Ishome, Kettel, Cell, Ben Howard, Lymbyc Systym, Brambles, Moddi, deadmau5, Kristian Kristensen, Yosi Horikawa, DumDum Boys, Frank Turner, Metallica, and Volbeat.

It’s the usual mix of electronica and altrock, spiced up with a little Las Vegas Big Band & Jazz. Interestingly, British act Lonely the Brave manages to keep the number one spot on my list this year as well. They played support for Biffy Clyro (3^rd most poular band this year) in Oslo in late October. Somehow, I managed to miss that concert. I beat myself up pretty bad because of that.

Truth in Numbers

As of right now in 2016, I’ve listened to a total of 14,296 tracks (5,576 unique) from 3,658 different albums released by 2,395 different artists. That, ladies and gentlemen, shows what an amazing service Spotify¹ is. It’s an amazing way to discove new music. And it’s possible at a fraction of the price it would have cost to buy everything.

Other interesting numbers from the Last.fm data:

• As we’ve already established, Lonely the Brave was the artist I listened to the most in 2016. But they also have the number one album, “The Day’s War (Victory Edition)”, and the number one track, “Trick of Light”.
• I mostly listened on workdays, only a fraction of my music consuming is done during the weekends.
• In 2016 I listened to 46% new artists, 73% new albums, and 71% new tracks compared to 2015. As I’ve already stated, I love how easy it is to discover new music with Spotify.
• On average, I listened to 42 tracks per day.
• And I listened to music for a total of 34 days and 18 hours of 2016. That’s 9.5% of the year.

This annual summary of my music habits usually contains a short presentation of 5 new artists I’ve come across during the year. But I’ve already rambled on long enough, so I’ll save that for another day.