Plays per year

Noticeable downticks when I got more into audiobooks/podcasts ('17, '19, '21) and an uptick after 2022 when I started listening to more music while working from home. 8k tracks per year at ~5 minutes per track shakes out to an average of between 1.5-2 hours listening per day.

Top artists, all-time

Sigh is an avante-garde black metal band from Japan fronted by a PhD physicist and saxophonist named Dr. Mikannibal.

Top artists by year

Click through for a top artists list by year.

Top tracks, all-time

This is basically a playlist of my favorite metal songs, corrupted by some cheesy reggae that reminds me of the sun. Plus Dvorak's Serenade for Strings because it's a banger.

Top tracks by year

In 2026, our daughter was born, and we listened to Devin Townsend Project's album "Ghost" 8 times back-to-back during labor. It's a perfect 'calm music' album, with interesting song writing without doing too much.

Genres over time (coarse)

I'm not currently satisfied with the genre classifications here (too much "other" especially). But regardless, some insights:

2015-2016: metal radio dj days, high percentage of metal music.

2018: fourth winter in Chicago, sun depravation meant I began listening to an absurd amount of (not very good) reggae music. This permanently changed my listening habits and reggae has persisted in my rotation ever since. Winter does bad things to people.

2020: triathlon + Spanish lessons meant a lot of high energy Spanish and Latin pop music.

2021: 3 month road trip around the US meant a lot of Spanish pop again, and less metal than ever (because it sounds terrible in a car).

2022: working from home meant an uptick in ambient and classical music, but lots of metal as well as it helps that I can't often understand the lyrics.

New artists each year

In 2025 I switched from mostly listening on Spotify to a self-hosted media server and my personal .mp3 collection of about 24,000 songs. This means I listen to less new music and re-listen to albums more often, which I think is good. I found with Spotify I was always listening to "new" music such that I often couldn't remember or capture the new material I liked. 1000 new artists a year is 3 new artists every day. Too many. I still crave new music and seek it out, but it's a much more deliberate process now.

What time of day do I listen?

The habit is clear: meetings in the morning so less music, increasing as the morning goes on. Then a dip for lunch, then music to help power through the afternoon and straight on into the evening for wind-down (notice the little shelf at 7-8pm).

When I listen (hour × day)

Same thing but with weekend segregation. Saturday is for socializing (less music), Sunday is chilling at home (more music).

Where the artists are from

I would have guessed that my listening habits are more geographically diverse than most, given the dominance of European metal music, and I also listen to a lot of Japanese metal and other artists. But US + GB still dominates my artists, apparently. Though some of the Japanese artists (and possibly other non-US artists) in the dataset were more difficult to find metadata for, so they may be underrepresented.

How concentrated is my listening?

80% of my listening comes from 44% of the songs I've listened to over the last 13 years. That's ~15,000 songs, which sounds about right from my 11,000 song library on Spotify.