Phil's 2023 Music Wrapped
Introduction
A couple of years ago, towards the end of 2021, I started seeing a new phenomenon popping up all across my social media feeds: Spotify Wrapped. It was a really cool, social media-friendly analysis of my friends’ listening habits across the last year. I don’t, and probably won’t ever, use Spotify in any regular way, but I do use a couple of other services that provide some back-end statistics:
[Caveats: for this analysis I drew only from my Roon server and Apple Music’s internal statistics. It doesn’t include the listening I did directly from Tidal (pretty minimal at this point, and really difficult to separate Tidal plays captured by Roon from those that aren’t), or any non-streaming listening like listening to vinyl, CDs, tapes, etc. So it’s pretty close, but won’t include quite everything. I’ve combined the data below. Totally possible I fat-fingered something in there, but the numbers seem pretty consistent.]
First, some overall numbers:
I’m surprised by how consistent I am across the years; it’s a little less than a 1% variation year-to-year; about twelve hours different from the high to the low, at least in terms of streaming. I feel like I listened to a lot less vinyl in 2023, but there’s no good way to track that without a lot of manual work.
This means that I was listening to streamed music about 15% of the time in 2023, or almost 22% of my waking hours (assuming 8 hours of sleep a night). I’m okay with that, and it sounds about right.
The Roon list is more interesting; they’re a mix of things that I deliberately pick in the moment or things that Roon comes back to a lot on shuffle. They’re all good songs and I get why they’re there; “Thank You” in particular is one I tend to throw on when I’m doing something in my bedroom like changing sheets or sorting laundry.
I do wish that Roon tracked number of plays instead of minutes played; I’d love to do a side-by-side without having to figure out track length and do the math.
Genres are pretty arbitrary in general, and I really don’t expect much consistency within a service, let alone across it, but I’m not particularly surprised that both suggest that I favor alternative, electronic, rock, and pop. I’m surprised rap doesn’t show up on Apple given how much I thought I listened to rap over the course of the year, but it probably just means that I did more of that listening at home (thanks to the newly-streaming De La Soul catalog and a deep dive back into A Tribe Called Quest’s older albums).
There are a couple of plausible explanations for this shift:
- Roon, the primary listening system in my house, which allows me to centrally direct music to a dozen endpoints around my house. Roon provides pretty detailed statistics about your listening habits, but only for either 1) a defined period starting on they day you’re looking and go back no more than the last year, or 2) as long as the server has been running.
- Tidal is the primary streaming service I use to feed Roon, and I occasionally use Tidal directly to listen to music on an iOS device or occasionally my work PC. Tidal’s data is reasonably accessible, but because I’m primarily playing Tidal via Roon, the datasets really overlap.
- Apple Music, which I use for virtually all my listening when I’m anywhere other than my house, either on an iPhone, iPad, or on my personal laptop. Oh, and I use it to listen to music in my living room via an Apple TV, or via any of the HomePods in my house because Siri sometimes makes it easier than pulling out my phone and using Roon if I only have a few minutes and I’m in a room other than my office.
- Last.fm, which theoretically “scrobbles” everything that’s played through Tidal or Apple Music.
[Caveats: for this analysis I drew only from my Roon server and Apple Music’s internal statistics. It doesn’t include the listening I did directly from Tidal (pretty minimal at this point, and really difficult to separate Tidal plays captured by Roon from those that aren’t), or any non-streaming listening like listening to vinyl, CDs, tapes, etc. So it’s pretty close, but won’t include quite everything. I’ve combined the data below. Totally possible I fat-fingered something in there, but the numbers seem pretty consistent.]
First, some overall numbers:
I’m surprised by how consistent I am across the years; it’s a little less than a 1% variation year-to-year; about twelve hours different from the high to the low, at least in terms of streaming. I feel like I listened to a lot less vinyl in 2023, but there’s no good way to track that without a lot of manual work.
This means that I was listening to streamed music about 15% of the time in 2023, or almost 22% of my waking hours (assuming 8 hours of sleep a night). I’m okay with that, and it sounds about right.
The Meat
Now for the fun stuff!
Top songs of 2023:
The Roon list is more interesting; they’re a mix of things that I deliberately pick in the moment or things that Roon comes back to a lot on shuffle. They’re all good songs and I get why they’re there; “Thank You” in particular is one I tend to throw on when I’m doing something in my bedroom like changing sheets or sorting laundry.
Top Artists of 2023:
Top Albums of 2023:
I do wish that Roon tracked number of plays instead of minutes played; I’d love to do a side-by-side without having to figure out track length and do the math.
Top Genres of 2023
Genres are pretty arbitrary in general, and I really don’t expect much consistency within a service, let alone across it, but I’m not particularly surprised that both suggest that I favor alternative, electronic, rock, and pop. I’m surprised rap doesn’t show up on Apple given how much I thought I listened to rap over the course of the year, but it probably just means that I did more of that listening at home (thanks to the newly-streaming De La Soul catalog and a deep dive back into A Tribe Called Quest’s older albums).
Listening Across Services over 3 Years
There are a couple of plausible explanations for this shift:
- In 2021, I was working remotely from home four and a half days a week, with only a half day a week in my office. For the last half of 2022 and basically all of 2023, I was working more or less two days a week in Seattle and from my home office only three days a week. This means less opportunity to listen to Roon, and more incentive to listen to Apple Music while in the office.
- Midway through 2021, Apple introduced lossless streaming and Spatial Audio for free to all Apple Music subscribers. This meant that I felt less obliged to use Tidal directly while I was out and about, because I could listen to CD-quality playback from Apple Music. Apple music is the native player for most of my out-and-about devices (iPhones, iPad, Apple laptop) so it’s more convenient, and when that convenience stopped being at the cost of sound quality …
- For whatever reason, Apple Music seems to play nicer with Carplay in my Kia, so sometime in 2022 I switched over from mostly streaming via Tidal on car trips to streaming via Apple Music. It’s not a huge amount of listening time, but when you figure I’m spending three hours a week minimum driving to and from Seattle, it starts to add up.
- Apple Music plays really nicely with Apple-branded or -owned headphones (Airpods, plus Beats products). In October of 2022 I was introduced to the Apple Airpods Pro2, which it turns out I really really love, despite myself. And then in November, I got a pair of the AirPods Max which I also really, really love, despite myself. Both also implement Apple’s spatial audio protocol really well, and sound good even with the limitations of Bluetooth. Because I really liked both pairs and their ANC transparency modes are so good in an office environment, I started mostly using them in the office and stopped using my Dragonfly Red frankendongleDAC or my desktop amp and wired headphones when I was in the office. While I could use the Airpods with Tidal … why bother when Apple Music is right there and tightly integrated?
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