Many years ago a geeky work colleague got me into a service called [Audioscrobbler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm). My memory is vague of what software I was using at the time, but this is a protocol that can be implemented in music players or as a plug-in to send metadata of each tune you play to their servers where it is logged. Seventeen years later and with them having changed name to [last.fm](https://last.fm/) I logged my 100,000th track this week. I am not sure which exact track it was, but I was listening to the album [All the Wars](https://www.last.fm/music/The+Pineapple+Thief/All+the+Wars) by The Pineapple Thief on Spotify.

![Milestone](https://images.ecency.com/DQmeMs6PL3kFmXPpQ11ezyrWa4EznwoMfzkZDGyMUp53NtZ/image.png)

So maybe it was this song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-usPV1rlI
It may be the first time I have listened to the album and it is not a happy video.

I used to be able to get away with having my music on my work PC. I have hundreds of CDs (that I own)  ripped and the odd dodgy download track. In recent years I have bought quite a few download albums from places like [Bandcamp](https://bandcamp.com/steevc).

I tend to listen to albums rather than playlists. Obviously I have my favourite artists and [the statistics](https://www.last.fm/user/steevc)tell me that Björk, eels, Radiohead and David Bowie are at the top. In the last year the top artists have been King Crimson, Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson, but Bowie is still at number four.

![Artists](https://images.ecency.com/DQmPTYYfXiBLrcyitf4ve8pZhiAgHZNBtBLrVxRdfWh6R39/image.png)

I have used lots of different apps for listening to music. [VLC](https://www.videolan.org/) was a good one for all platforms, but on Linux I have used Amarok and Rhythmbox. There is an official app for Android that logs music played in various apps. Some of the time it logged my podcast listening too. [Web Scrobbler](https://github.com/web-scrobbler/web-scrobbler) works in various browsers to log music from Youtube and other sites. With videos it does make some wrong guesses about what is music, but then there is a lack of consistent metadata.

These days I mostly listen to my collection and have been using Spotify a lot to revisit old favourites I do not have in digital form as well as discovering music that is new to me, if not always recent. When I was in the office in the last few years it was not so viable to listen to lots of music and so the tracks per week went down a lot, but as I have been working at home for the last year I can have music on all day.

I just noticed that Rising Star by @risingstargame got 'Scrobbled' 31 times last year. That was probably the browser extension picking up the in-game radio. You can delete tracks you do not want logged.

I seem to listen to a lot of different music as the most frequently played tracks only have 49 plays. I will highlight some particular favourites from the top ten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdMHy074kNc

I do love King Crimson. One of my first CDs was The Compact King Crimson compilation that features a lot of a Adrian Belew period. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w772GXG5LnE

My love of Led Zeppelin goes back to my teenage years. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H8nm4i-I2Q

As well as loud rock I have a special love of Björk and Vespertine is a special album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pYG_lag0Ow

Frost* are a more recent obsession, but they are quite brilliant. As with Björk I have seen them live a couple of times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEWlSTQ1RI

Porcupine Tree are also a relatively recent passion since a friend got me on the guest list for a gig.

last.fm does have a social side where you can follow people and leave comments, but that has not been a big part of it for me. I was able to get notifications of gigs by bands I like and did use that a bit. I paid for the service for a while to get extra features and less ads. The company was bought out in 2007 by CBS, but I do not know if it makes much money. Various features have come and gone. It used to be possible to stream music from the site. Some people did not like the company controlling their data and [libre.fm](https://libre.fm/) was created that I believe uses the same protocol. 

I just like having access to all the statistics. There is an API so you can extract data. I ought to play with that, but the site provides various graphs. Of course it lacks data for the many years I was listening to music off-line. I do still play some vinyl albums. I could probably log those with a script, but it is not something I worry about.

Rock on!