That Was The Year That Was (In Music): 2020 Edition

Last week I posted my 2020 reading report from Goodreads; this week, it’s time for my 2020 listening report from Last.fm:

A few observations about these statistics:

• Last year I had 11 followers where I didn’t know who they were; this year, those 11 followers have disappeared. Bots? Probably.
• I attended 0 events last year, which, in 2020, could also be referred to as “doing one’s civic duty”. (The previous year, I had considered attending a Metric concert in San Diego—the band, not the system of weights and measures—but didn’t. Had I known that it was going to be, like, the last concert B.C.*, maybe I would have gone.)
• Look at me, way out in front on the “Scrobble Leaderboard”. But mostly playing the same old stuff.
• Happily, there were no months where my listening habits plummeted to near zero this year.
• Look at me, being all two-thirds mainstream. And here I thought I was mostly alternative …

Here are my top 100 artists for 2020:

A few notes on this chart:

• Not a lot of change from 2019 there, as may be expected based on my minuscule “New Artists” rate.
• That’s still not the picture of the correct Fisher and likely never will be again.
• For those who remember last year’s “Battle of the Female Pop Violinists”, this year, Emilie Autumn bested Lindsey Stirling pretty handily. This is probably due to Emilie Autumn’s making her entire catalog free for a few days at the end of 2020, which caused me to acquire a few albums of remixes, classical music, and B-sides and such that I probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise.

Next, we have my top albums of 2020:

A few notes on this list:

• As I’ve mentioned before, the top album list at Last.fm is very heavily skewed towards albums with a lot of tracks. Hey, Last.fm, perhaps you’d like to make a chart that divides album plays by number of tracks on the album?
• While I’m going “Hey, Last.fm” … Hey, Last.fm, how do you not have a picture of the greatest hits albums from Hall & Oates or Tom Petty? Or the Eurythmics? They’re not that old, are they? Are they???

And finally, my top tracks of 2020:

Notes on the top tracks of 2020:

• I have no idea when, how, or why I played “I Can’t Dance” 30 times in 2020, or, indeed, how any of the songs in the top 6 got recorded as played that often; I suspect some manner of reporting error in the Scrobbler application. But hey, if “I Can’t Dance” being my top song of the year makes me unique, then sure. Everyone wants to be unique, right?
• At least this year, my top 50 tracks actually does contain three of my actual favorite songs; last year it contained none of them. Rather than make the reader guess which songs I’m referring to, they are:

* Figuring out what “B.C.” means in this context is an exercise left to the reader. I doubt it will be very difficult.
** Yes, “Decode” is from the Twilight soundtrack. No, this doesn’t mean I’ve ever actually seen a Twilight film.
*** Because Plumb is one of my favorite artists, recommendation engines are constantly suggesting I should listen to Christian music. Apparently it’s difficult to explain to a recommendation engine “I don’t like Christian music, I just like Plumb”.