One year of Last.fm, and some thoughts on my listening habits

17 August 2026

Today (August 17, 2026) marks my first complete year using Last.fm. It's a shame I didn't discover this great service earlier, knowing it has existed for more than 20 years, and that I've been listening to music almost every day since my teenage years (the good old 90s). I love stats, so imagine how many years of listening data I could have had by now. Well… better late than never!

Anyway, I discovered and signed up to Last.fm in August 2025, a year after ditching my music streaming subscriptions and going fully local. I wrote about it in this post: Listening to music the 2000s way: one year later

Well, let’s take advantage of this anniversary to publish a bit of listening stats for the last 365 days! These are basic stats though, the ones that are publicly available on my profile page. I’m not a Last.fm Pro user for now, but maybe I’ll give it a try, one day.

General notes

To this day, I have recorded around 11,300 scrobbles and have listened to more or less 715 artists. I'm not writing the exact numbers, as I wrote this post over two separate sessions, while still listening to (and scrobbling) music.

That’s an average of 31 songs a day. It might seem like a lot, but it's not that much when you consider I listen to music almost every day, including moments spent with close ones, during which music always plays in the background, sometimes for hours.

Before diving into my Last.fm stats, here are a few words about my music listening habits.

Local first…

Since I cancelled my streaming subscriptions, I obviously mostly listen to music stored locally on my phone or computer. I use the same software on both devices: Doppler. It’s a one-time payment app, beautiful, a bit too basic but effective.

Here are some numbers, as of today, about my desktop and mobile music libraries (note: albums also include a few homemade compilations):

On my computer:

• 881 albums
• 14,223 tracks
• 130 GB

On my phone:

• 410 albums
• 5,850 tracks
• 55 GB

Retrieving those numbers on my MacBook Pro was easy, but doing so on my iPhone was another story. I had to build a Shortcut to count the mp3 files stored on my phone, then manually count the albums through Doppler's interface (since the album count, strangely, is displayed on the macOS version but not on the iOS one).

My music library is composed of a lot of CD rips from my physical collection (which I've had since I was a young teenager and which still keeps growing), plus a good amount of digital albums I bought (at first on iTunes, then mostly on Bandcamp), and, let's be honest, some music of more questionable origins, most of it acquired in the early 2000s and kept ever since.

Looking at those numbers makes me realise that it’s a lot of music. But it’s also a nice and accurate representation of my music tastes and how it has been evolving throughout my life.

… but still streaming from time to time

Even though I listen to music locally 90% of the time, I’m still streaming some music from time to time. The platforms I use the most are:

• Bandcamp, my first choice for listening to artists whose music I haven't bought yet, or when I don't have my usual devices with me.
• YouTube Music (free account), the service I use if I want to listen to specific things, such as video game music and stuff I won’t find elsewhere, and also if I’m not able to use my usual devices.

I’m able to scrobble what I’m listening to on those services (and other ones) thanks to a browser extension. Yet, on rare occasions, I’m not able to scrobble what I’m listening to. Which is a pain when I realise it. Just joking. Am I?

And now… some stats

For each “Top” section, I’ll only say a few words about the first place. Otherwise, this post will become too long.

Top artists

Joe Hisaishi takes first place. I love his music, especially what he composed for Takeshi Kitano’s movies during the 90s. If I had one record to suggest to anyone who would like to discover Hisaishi’s work, it would be, without hesitation, ‌Joe Hisaishi Meets Kitano Films.

It’s a record I of course own, bought back in 2001. I played it countless times, back in the day, on my stereo system, to fall asleep.

Top albums

The first album is actually a homemade compilation of 65 classics of French variety, from the 60s to the 90s. Usually, it is listened to twice a year, during a gathering with friends of mine in the countryside. The compilation runs for almost two days non stop, which explains why it holds first place. Plus, I also listen to it from time to time.

Top tracks

Stars, by Hum is the track I listened to the most during the last year. That’s funny, because even though it’s a classic of the 90s alt-rock era, I only discovered it in 2025, 30 years after it was released! I heard it was a big hit in the USA, back then. However, it unfortunately never crossed the ocean to reach French FM radios. Too bad, because it would have fit really well into 90s radio programming, here in France.

More things, thanks to the Last.fm API

Even as a basic (free) Last.fm user, I was able to create an account to use their API, which made it possible to build the two following scripts.

Top genres

The “Top” stats above tell a lot about the genres I’m listening to the most, but I managed to dig a bit deeper into my scrobbles to retrieve a more detailed list of the different genres I’m listening to.

I ran a script which, basically, pulled my top 500 artists from the last 365 days and checked Last.fm to get their associated genres. It then calculated my total scrobbles per genre, merged duplicates, and generated a ranked list in descending order.

Here is the result, my “Top 20 genres”:

Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of rock and metal along with their various subgenres. That’s what I’ve been listening to the most since I started to listen to music on my own. I wrote about the albums that defined my teenage years in a dedicated post: My teenage years in 12 albums

There's also some classical music (I kind of enjoy the genre from time to time, and I even own a few records from the Deutsche Grammophon Essentials collection).

I think that composer and anime relate to the same things: movie and anime soundtracks (mostly Joe Hisaishi, but also Geinoh Yamashirogumi, who composed the Akira soundtrack, and Kenji Kawai, composer of the Ghost in the Shell soundtrack). I also listen to a lot of movie scores while writing and working.

Finally, I guess French and Chanson Française could easily be merged.

Weekly stats

Thanks to the Last.fm API, I also built a small script in PHP to get my weekly stats, and automatically build a post I publish each Friday on my microblog.

I have to manually publish it, though. Even if I think I could automate it through a cron task, I don’t feel the need to do it and I like to give a quick look at my stats, each Friday, before posting them on my microblog.

Long live Last.fm

Well, initially, I just wanted to write a few words about my first year using Last.fm. It seems I had a lot to say and it became a longer post than I thought! But never mind, it was great to dive into my stats. I guess the next time I'll revisit my stats will be in my 2026 round-up post, early 2027!

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