Reflections on two decades of scrobbling music
Early this week, I hit a milestone. I didn’t reach goal weight or beat my best marathon time. My birthday was last month and I didn’t reach a noteworthy age, other than that the number keeps getting bigger. It’s not my wedding anniversary, it’s not Treble’s anniversary (that was in October, 22 for those keeping track), and it’s not either of my cats’ birthdays. I didn’t review my 5,000th album, though it’s possible I did (I haven’t been keeping track). I didn’t go skydiving for the first time and I haven’t been to every state in America, though moving out of one of the most geographically sprawling states at least makes it easier to do so. And if making my first million is in the cards (it’s not), it definitely hasn’t happened yet.
But I did scrobble my 300,000th song.
Scrobbling, for those unfamiliar, is the automated process of tracking the music you listen to via the Last.fm app. But chances are anyone reading this is not only familiar with the music-tracking app but possibly, maybe even likely, a habitual user. The frequency of 5×5 charts that pop up on my Instagram stories and Bluesky feed tells me that’s at least partially true, and it always takes me by surprise when the person posting their weekly listens is younger than me, given that Last.fm is more than two decades old—an ancient technology adopted by geriatric millennials like myself. And I’ve been using it for nearly two decades.
At first I didn’t really get the point of it; the appeal of keeping ongoing stats of what songs I listened to didn’t register with me until I actually saw them taking shape in real time. But it also took a few years before the integration fully worked with my listening methods. I had a stubborn iPod that wouldn’t toggle my scrobbles (say that ten times fast) in any predictable pattern, and the more I shifted my listening to analog over digital, I just lived with the fact that some of what I chose to spin wouldn’t make its way onto the leaderboard. (Third party apps now have that all ironed out. For the most part…)
Sometime last year, it struck me that 18 years of my life in listens had been chronicled by this passive desktop app, a digital portrait of Dorian Gray that unfortunately doesn’t prevent my physical self from deteriorating. I can comb through all the stats I’ve stacked up in that time and see embarrassing photos of myself from a naive time, commend myself for the times I’ve been ahead of the curve, and be frustrated that what I see in this slow-motion capture as it develops hasn’t fully caught up to who I am now.
Here are some observations from nearly two decades of scrobbles, which maybe tell me something about myself.
Some measurements are dubious
For much of the past 15 or 16 years, my top album was M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, a record that I like but which I didn’t actually listen to more than, say, Baroness’ Blue Record, which currently sits at number 21. The reason for that is because each song scrobbled counts as a listen for that album, and Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming has 22 tracks to Blue Record‘s 12. Which means I’d almost literally have to listen to the latter twice as many times as the former in order for it to catch up. In other words, I didn’t actually listen to the M83 album more often, it just has a lot of songs. And so most of the all-time album scrobbles on my list are, of course, albums or compilations with a lot of songs: Wire’s Pink Flag (#1), Baroness’ Yellow and Green (#2), Magnolia Electric Co.’s Sojourner (#3), The Clash’s London Calling (#7), Guided by Voices’ Alien Lanes (#9), and of course M83, which is now at #12. Similarly, my top album of 2025 wasn’t my actual album of the year, billy woods’ Golliwog, but Gillian Welch’s Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, a 3xLP box set of material with 48 songs. The lesson? Bulk rises to the top.
The past lingers
Scrobbles can be broken down by week, month, year, or all-time, which is an interesting way to see how your tastes and habits have changed over time. For instance, my top album in 2013 was Iceage’s You’re Nothing (another case of more tracks—my #1 album that year was Deafheaven’s Sunbather, which is #13), my top artist of 2010 was Tom Waits, and the last song I listened to in 2017 was, apparently, Sharon Van Etten’s “Ask.” But when you zoom out to the all-time list, what you’re listening to now is overshadowed by everything that came before—for better or for worse—simply because it takes a long time for new scrobbles to catch up to what you’ve already logged. The National are still in my top 50 artists, for instance, but I don’t listen to them with anything close to the regularity I did, say, 15 years ago. I listened to four songs by the band in 2025, apparently. And then of course there are all those M83 scrobbles that clobbered the rest of my stats. It’s not that I no longer listen to either of them at all, but it’s a skewed view—you’re seeing 2009 me and 2010 me as much as you are 2020 me. Wait, that was the Covid year, maybe we should just skip over that one?
Some scrobbles can’t be buried fast enough
For a long time, Ryan Adams was pretty high on my list of top artists. Ditto Kanye West. And in the early 2010s, that was fine! But now? Woof. Following their respective descents into sexual misconduct and a far-right-wing heel turn, you can understand why I don’t want them anywhere near my top artists. That’ll happen sometimes, and we all have our own lines we choose to draw in terms of how much separation between art and artist we establish, or how much we’re willing to forgive. Actual Nazi shit is so far beyond the line that I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a problem. But in my own defense, at least I don’t have any Burzum scrobbles!
The only milestone that matters is your own
I’m not on any artist’s top listeners, as far as I know (though the community stats for Preservation & Gabe ‘Nandez’s Sortilége need to go way higher, pronto), and I can’t claim any record-breaking numbers on my part. Recent scans of social media shares and discussions on Reddit have provided an eye-opening reminder of why that’ll almost certainly never happen. For instance, I haven’t logged 80,000 scrobbles of a single artist, and for the life of me I don’t know why you’d even want to. That much familiarity would almost certainly breed contempt. And while I’ve listened to 6,000 artists—a pretty big number in my mind, at least—there are those who’ve surpassed 90,000. Which means if I were to attempt something similar, over 20 years, I’d have had to find a new artist to listen to every three or four tracks, which, I’ll just say it, is too many. It takes enough effort on my part to keep track of and process 6,000 artists in 19 years. To attempt to multiply that 16-fold would be maddening.
Some things don’t really change
Your Last.fm stats are a living document that tracks how you change as a listener, and if you dig a little deeper, maybe on a more personal level as well. What I’ve listened to has only grown more diverse with time, and I like to think that’s because as I’ve gotten older I’ve grown more curious, more interested in what wasn’t already familiar, what wasn’t already part of an established routine. And it could certainly go in the opposite direction based on whether or not you keep up the same appetite for music over time (and for that matter, remember to scrobble what you listen to).
But some things don’t really change all that much, and there’s something comforting in that. My top artists in 2010 included Tom Waits, Wire and The Cure. In 2016, my top 10 featured The Cure, David Bowie and PJ Harvey. In 2019? Baroness, The Cure, and David Bowie. You probably see where I’m going with this: My overall top 10 from 19 years of scrobbling includes David Bowie, Tom Waits, Wire, PJ Harvey, The Cure and Baroness (and my number 3 is Broadcast, which has steadily been climbing over time). Despite how it may seem from my point of view, maybe the picture of me that my scrobbles have captured doesn’t look that different from the in-person version, after all.
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