That Was The Year That Was (In Music): 2024 Edition

Last week I posted my 2024 reading report from Goodreads; this week, it’s time for my 2024 listening report from Last.fm. What was playing this year? If you guessed it’s largely the same as what was playing last year, you won’t be too far off. Let’s start with the big report, shall we?

A few observations about these statistics:

• Once again, my actual favorite band, Metric, is also my most-Scrobbled band, by a pretty wide margin; and my actual second-favorite band, The Joy Formidable (aka “TJF”), is in their correct spot as well.
• Three of my most-listened-to albums are also by Metric, as one might expect, but my most-listened-to album is Hitch by TJF. I would say Hitch is my favorite album at the moment, so this makes sense. (In case anyone is interested, that album Singles that snuck in at #4 is from New Order.)
• My top new artist this year was Black Belt Eagle Scout, who I found out about from the (excellent) show Reservation Dogs. If you haven’t seen that show, I highly recommend it.
• Once again this year, my most-listened to song, by an astonishing margin, was “Liana” by TJF. My second-most-listened-to song is also off their album Hitch. The remaining three of the top five songs are, as one would expect, from Metric, starting with my current favorite Metric song, “On the Sly”. (My favorite Metric song changes pretty frequently.)

My “Liana” habit makes me special, apparently.

Next up, Last.fm provides a little bit of trivia:

And after that, we have charts. Yay, data!

Next up, we have my “Mainstream Score” and some Quick Facts and trivia:

All right, time to get into the lists, starting with my top 50 artists for 2024:

Oh, yeah, okay, The Church beat out Missy Higgins by 47 plays.

Next, we have my top 50 albums of 2024:

Aside from some favorites that I played repeatedly, we’re back to the list being dominated by greatest hits collections, retrospectives, and things with lots of songs on them like the “Silent Hill” soundtracks.

And finally, my top tracks of 2024:

This year, I noticed that there was a thing called Last.fm “Playback” (possibly competing with Spotify “Wrapped”?), so I thought I would take a look at that this time.

Ooh, there are graphs!

And Bubbles!

Hey, Playback, what was my favorite album? Wait, let me guess! Was it Hitch?

Did I listen to one song from Hitch a lot? Huh did I?

A few other stats from Playback:

Well, maybe next year I can hit #1 on something. In the meantime, here’s the “Playback” summary:

Oh, also, one final thing: There are various sites out there that will scrape your Last.fm playback data and present it to you in interesting ways. The most fun one I came across this year was InstaFest, which takes your top artists and creates a fictional music festival starring your favorites. Here’s mine for 2024. You will never guess who the headliners are. Go ahead, guess.

And that’s a wrap for this year’s music retrospective! Tune in again in January of 2026 for a look back at the books and music of 2025!