Since I have a de­cent UPNP client again most of the stuff I lis­ten to is scrob­bled to last.fm. So last.fm pro­vides some data about that. But with­out an ex­pla­na­tion those are just mean­ing­less sta­tis­tics. So here is the ex­pla­na­tion.

My mu­sic li­brary is an old fash­ioned col­lec­tion of ripped au­dio CDs. On the filesys­tem they are or­ga­nized in artist and al­bum di­rec­to­ries, but they are played through the Me­di­aTomb UPNP serv­er, with a cus­tom im­port script that lists all tracks in an artist and al­bum hi­er­ar­chy, be­cause there are of course also al­bums with tracks by dif­fer­ent artists. That whole bunch is then usu­al­ly played in a ran­dom or­der. The is­sue that skews the sta­tis­tics is that last.fm only counts the num­ber of times a track is played, which doesn't rep­re­sent the amount of lis­ten­ing. That's be­cause not every track has the same length, and it varies huge­ly in my mu­sic li­brary. Play­ing a sin­gle track by Ben Liebrand takes usu­al­ly an hour, and some tracks are glued to­geth­er from three CDs and go on for three hours. From oth­er artists I only have some sin­gle col­lec­tion with a lot of clas­sic three minute tracks which can rack up about twen­ty plays per hour. Jan Ham­mer has a lot of short tracks, with the Mi­a­mi Vice theme be­ing only one minute, and ap­pear­ing three times in my col­lec­tion be­cause it's on 3 dif­fer­ent CDs. And in be­tween that are a lot of remix­es that are longer than the av­er­age ra­dio edit, so the weight­ed av­er­age is a bit dif­fer­ent than what last.fm shows.

And I cheat by also also scrob­bling the tracks I hear when lis­ten­ing to Ra­dio Stad Den Haag.