…has this changed me permanently? What exactly is my taste in music? How will I know if the stuff that thought I liked was not just a product of my addiction? Only time will tell I guess…

I wrote those words the better part of a year ago referring to my taste crippling addiction to my last.fm playcounts and the various insalubrious statistics which one can derive from it. It turned out I wasn’t the only one. One commenter wrote:

You have opened my eyes, this has to stop. Today I’m removing my the AEP counter from my page. This can’t go on. Scrobbling should be about the fun!

Indeed. More recently I received an email from a fellow sufferer looking for guidance:

I recently read your article on your LastFM addiction (I’m very behind I know) and I HAVE THE EXACT SAME THING. How has your withdrawal gone? I’ve wanted to delete it several times, but I feel like losing all my Scrobbles would be wasted ‘work’ or something. Plus I’m just now getting into Porcupine Tree, and I’ve got this ridiculous idea that not being able to see how many Scrobbles I have of them will prevent me from gauging my ‘progress’ in getting into them. I would try and stop visiting the site and scrobbling, but I know I CAN’T DO THAT NOW because I’m hopelessly addicted. I also have the problem you had where I’m not even sure if I really like artists or if I’ve convinced myself I have to increase my versatility. Anyway, any tips? How did your attempt to break the addiction go?

I did break my last.fm addiction, for the most part. Here’s how.

After writing the article I struggled on for a few more weeks and nothing had really changed. Even if I wasn’t checking my last.fm stats (which I still felt compelled to do, at least once a week), always present was the knowledge that it was there, and everything I listened to was still out there for analysis and interrogation. Some more drastic action was needed. I toyed with the idea of deleting my account entirely, but it still seemed like an important document to me, so in the end I simply opted to cease scrobbling. Job done. I scrobbled nothing for at least 6 months.

Knowing that no-one but me would know what I was listening to I was slowly allowed to listen to music free of that volition. It felt really liberating, and what followed was a voyage of rediscovery. The feeling that I could listen to anything that I wanted was an intoxicating one – holding on to this feeling is what allowed me to finally kill my addiction. Eventually, what I discovered was that my music taste wasn’t as perverted as I had expected, just a little more directed – I was always listening to what I wanted to listen to, for the most part, but now it doesn’t feel like a guilty pleasure.

However, in the end, I really still valued the service of having a log of all my music listens – I’m both a music and stats geek (as you may have noticed) so the lure is inevitable. After some agonising, soul searching and mental preparation, I fired up a fresh last.fm account and started scrobbling again a couple of months ago, but this time with a resolve to use it as it was intended, to log mine and my family’s music listening in all its dread reality, warts and all. There’s no point in hiding from yourself, it will always catch up with you in the end.

Ironically, when you install the iTunes Scrobbler it scrobbles your entire history, which for me went back years, so my new account is pretty similar to my old one. However, I only check it occasionally. I checked my AEP once, but It’s not on my profile and it’s not something I pride myself on (there’s nothing that commendable about taste diversity after all, is there?).

Recently my son, 3 years old, learned to adore Neil Young’s Live Rust (don’t ask how he stumbled upon that album, I hardly ever listen to it!). He listens to it all the time, and each time it gets scrobbled (I intercepted a few but the vast majority are). It irks me a little, but I can live with it. I think that is a sign of recovery, for the most part.

In the end, my ‘addiction’ was probably a manifestation of some latent OCD tendencies, and these things should be tackled head on, which is what I eventually did. There was always a hint or irony in my original article, there are many worse an addiction to have after all, but I’m absolutely serious when I say that it had a real affect on my life, and I felt genuine elation to be rid of it. You’ll also see that I’ve learned to control last.fm and use the beguiling data in there for more constructive purposes.

Music isn’t and should NEVER feel like work, it is one of the ultimate escapes and releases. Music should be celebrated in volume and at volume, not measured out in rations.

So, am I reformed, rehabilitated? As much as I need to be and probably as much as I’ll ever be. Music, after all, doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and outside influences will always play a part in your music tastes and last.fm is but one of these. I can live with that.

Here’s my last.fm account if any of you want to join me on are bored/perverse enough to spy on my listening habits.

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The last.fm straw – A Tale of Addiction

Lemmy - a skew loose?

So we’ve learned that some bands have pretty obsessive fans. It’s nice that they’re listening to a lot of Opeth’s music, but are they just getting gooey over one album or even a single track? Let me demonstrate what I mean at its most extreme – the one hit wonder. This is not a phenomenon that’s particularly prevalent in the metal genre, so we’ll look to the genre most susceptible: pop. When I think of one hit wonders, one track always seems to spring to mind: Deep Blue Something – Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s a nauseating ditty that seems to blight the airwaves still, even 17 years after its release. Let’s see what Deep Blue Something’s last.fm listener profile looks like shall we?

Breakfast at Tiffany's and some other tracks

Oh dear, a staggering 83% of Deep Blue Something’s overall listens were from that one track that you doubtlessly find occasionally looping round in your brain, eating away at your soul. In statistical speak this effect is broadly referred to as Skew or Skewness. According to Wikipedia “In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable.” Ummm, yes. Put more simply, and in the current context, if folks are listening to 1 or 2 songs from a bands catalogue lots, and hardly anything else, then that band’s playcount would be considered to be skewed. In last.fm circles, the calculation for this is often referred to as AEP (I won’t bore you with what it means, other than it’s a fairly arbitrary statistical calculation) which gives an indication of skew across a band’s top 50 tracks. The AEP is a value of between 0 and 5 that indicate skewness, where 5 is not skewed at all (all tracks listened to exactly that same amount of times) and 0 (or less) is very skewed. Thanks to that wretched track, Deep Blue Something’s AEP is -13 (yes minus 13), compared to, to pick another more successful pop act, Michael Jackson, whose AEP is a respectable 2.7.

So, how does my list of metal acts fare in the AEP stakes? Let’s have a look:

So here we see a different picture again. These are very high AEP’s, which indicates that the bands’ top 50 most listened to tracks are listened to a comparable amount of times. What this suggests about a band is that they’re not just a 1 trick pony – their fans love a wide variety of their tracks rather than listening to just a couple before moving on. Predictably, In Flames make a reappearance, Opeth remain strong, and we all knew that Devin Townsend fans were an obsessive bunch (this incidentally, doesn’t include all the numerous variations on Townsend’s solo band names, or SYL, who are #32 in this list). This is a respectable list – Neurosis, Tool, Cathedral, all at the top of their game and widely respected, and there’s a real mix of genres here. Perhaps this is a demonstration of a quality all round band, no filler. Albums bands, career artists.

This may all be true, but things get a lot more interesting, and confusing, if we consider the other end of my (far from exhaustive) list:

Yeah, a bunch of flash in the pan, one hit wonders – non-players. Oh wait…those would actually be some of the most revered and respected bands in the rock/metal arena! What went wrong? I’ll give you 5 reasons: Smells Like Teen Spirit, Crazy Train, Paranoid, Black Hole Sun and last, but by no means least, Ace of Spades. If you don’t know exactly what those 5 labels refer to, then you must have been living in a cave for the past 40 years. Now, for many of these bands, these tracks are the worst, but not the only, offender (Come as You Are is a close second for Nirvana for example), but each bands have significant skew thanks to these BIG hits in their back catalogue, something that few of our least skewed acts have. So we’re still missing a dimension here…

Let’s take Mötorhead, who are skewed into minus numbers by their ‘classic’ (quoted as Lemmy doesn’t reckon it’s their best track) Ace of Spades. Now, as we saw earlier, Breakfast at Tiffiny’s accounts for 83% of DBS’s overall listens, so what of Ace of Spades? Well, it clocks in at a modest 10% of Mötorhead overall listens. So where are all the other listens going? Well, remember that AEP is calculated across a band’s top 50 tracks, so the majority of listens of Mötorhead’s tracks must be happening outside of their top 50. Given Mötorhead’s rich and voluminous back catalogue this is hardly surprising.

So, there’s another calculation that will tell us which bands benefit from this sort of listener attention, it’s called the Long Tail and we’ll discuss this in the next article.

Related articles:

A long tail of a critical discrepancy

Numbers of the Beast #1: Love you long time