That Was The Year That Was (In Music): 2019 Edition

Last week I posted my 2019 reading report from Goodreads; this week, it’s time for my 2019 listening report from Last.fm. Last year, Last.fm generated a nice 2018 listening recap report and dashboard; this year they did the same:

A few observations about these statistics:

• I have no idea who those 11 new followers are, or who the original 6 followers are, but they’re apparently seeing a lot of rock songs by female vocalists. And also a lot of U2.
• I actually was interested in seeing the Metric show in San Diego in 2019. I just didn’t tell Last.fm about it.
• I have no idea why the number of tracks spiked so high in April. Maybe I accidentally left my iPod running.
• Something happened early in November that seriously curtailed my music listening for the next two months. Next week, I’ll be getting into what that was.

Here are the straight up 2019 charts, starting with the top 20 artists and monthly “scrobble” count for 2019:

A few observations about the Top 20:

• The Top 20 chart is almost identical to the 2018 chart. Apparently I’m mostly sticking with my 80s and 90s stalwarts, with the exception of a few artists like The Birthday Massacre and Metric (two of my current favorites).
• That’s still not the picture of the correct Fisher. Sadly, the correct Fisher has disbanded so it’s unlikely we will be seeing their picture rise to the top at Last.fm again.

For those who are interested, here’s the rest of my Top 50 artists for 2019. There’s a little more decade variety in here, although it is still weighted pretty heavily towards the 80s and 90s (and even a few 70s!) performers.

A few notes on the balance of the Top 50:

• In the battle of the female pop* violinists, Lindsey Stirling bested Emilie Autumn by 15 places. Part of this is because I just discovered Lindsey Stirling in 2019; part of it is because Emilie Autumn hasn’t put out a new album in a while.
  • If the two of them actually did do battle, I am pretty sure that Emilie Autumn would win.
• Queen is on this list because after watching the film Bohemian Rhapsody I realized I was scandalously short on Queen songs, so I picked up their “Platinum Collection” (see next section).
• In the battle of the bands that sound like Paramore, Tonight Alive is two places ahead of the actual Paramore. (Hey Monday puts in their appearance way down in position 130.) Seeing as how, these days, Tonight Alive sounds more like Paramore than Paramore does, and Hey Monday broke up years ago, this makes sense.

Next up, we have my top albums of 2019:

A few notes on this list:

• It’s kind of skewed because each track on the album counts as a play of the album, and since I almost always listen to entire albums, it tends to favor albums with more tracks on them; hence the large number of “greatest hits” and “essentials” and “ultimate collections”. (Masculin Feminin by Blonde Redhead contains 37 tracks. 37!)
• On this list, Emilie Autumn bests Lindsey Stirling. Revenge!

And finally, my top tracks of 2019:

Not much to say about this list, except that it’s clearly the product of shuffle, since it contains not a single one of my favorite songs, such as “Shimmer” by Fuel, “Celebrate” by Metric, “You’ll Be Mine” by the Pierces, “Shallow Grave” by the Birthday Massacre, “Black Eyed Boy” by Texas, and “In My Arms” by Plumb. (Well, okay, maybe “Cantaloop” qualifies as one of my favorites.) And also, Lindsey Stirling defeats Emilie Autumn again, notching two entries in the top 20 on this chart, while Emilie Autumn does not appear until position #305(!). Game, set, and match to Lindsey Stirling this year.

Tune in next week for the beginning of a series of posts on what happened in November that threw 2019 into disarray. It’s not going to be the sort of subject matter that usually appears here.

* Okay, fine, Emilie Autumn is more of a goth punk violinist than a pop one. So sue me.