I haven't "scrobbled" in many years, but checked now that I in 2007 (when I was 16) had 12,377 plays with only 153 unique songs. An average of playing each song 78 times. However, most of the songs I only listened to a few times, so there is basically just ~20+ songs I listened to 250-500 times each that year.
So I guess I was a typical teenager that got obsessed with some songs/artists and listened to them non stop, heh.
Basically, I listen to what I like to listen to no matter the season. If you have last.fm change the last slash in that URL with your username and after a couple minutes (it's single-threaded pulling API requests) it'll show your analysis.
- Manually (or using your Facebook timeline?) place out big events in your life and see if you can see what kind of music you listened to before/after them that you don't normally. I listen to depressing shit post break-ups.
- Use your Twitter or any other feed to estimate your "mood" over time and see if you can find any music you listened to while you're angry
- Use The Echo Nest to get metrics for how happy/sad/energetic the music you listen to is.
- Come up with your own definition of albums played! I hate Last.fm's because, as you mentioned, it heavily biases albums with multiple tracks. In my personal analysis I always start off with a RLE for tracks played on the same album, and my metric for "albums I listen to the most" is "which albums do I listen to at least 3 continuous songs from the most".
I spent a few months this year trying to combine my Last.fm listening history with my geolocation history (I've mostly just stayed in the same place for the last 8 years, 3-4 years) and Forecast.io's historical API to be able to answer the question "am I really only happy when it rains?" -- Data warehousing is a hard problem, though.
Auto-creates a Spotify playlist from your scrobbles from 6 months, or a year ago or whenever. For instance, if you want to walk a mile in the article author's shoes (ears?): http://deja-entendu.zomg.zone/gboeing
I could see where my tastes would change based on where I was in my life (high school, college, entering a relationship, etc). These transitions marked huge changes in my tastes.
It was also cool to see other trends. For example, I found that I have a "concert bounce" where I listen to an artist much more after seeing them live.
But what do I know, there's a browser extension that does that! http://build.last.fm/item/1000591
Back to last.fm I go.
