Tag Archives: Music

My Year in Music (Frak Spotify Wrapped)

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To repeat what I said last year in My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped), though I have a Spotify account, the way I use the service – which, not coincidentally, I have just canceled our premium family subscription plan to because of the variety of ways it is an absolutely shitsome company – simply doesn’t reflect or capture the overwhelming amount of music listening I do. Because of this, the 2023 Spotify Wrapper inspired me to begin exporting on December 1 of each year the usage/meta data from my actively curated Apple Music library, which contains over 23,000 songs that we actually own. Thanks to some above-average Excel skills, this is now the second year in a row I’ve been able to assemble a report to Spotify’s while denying them the ability to gather the user data needed to both create it and, more importantly, monetize and use it for their own nefarious needs.

So, without further preamble, my 2025 year in music…

Listened for 54,871 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so,) or 38.1 days of music. I would like to note that my recent transition into playing whole albums on CD rather than through my music library is not captured in this data.

Played 4,501 different songs (I often simply shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad” by Tears for Fears, 41 times.

The top song leaderboard:

  1. “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad,” Tears for Fears
  2. “Astronaut,” Tears for Fears
  3. “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars
  4. “The Girl That I Call Home,” Tears for Fears
  5. “Dear God,” Black Landlord
  6. “Emily Said,” Tears for Fears
  7. “Landlocked,” Tears for Fears
  8. “Close to Me,” The Cure
  9. “Change,” Tears for Fears
  10. “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen

The first five Tears for Fears songs were an EP (of sorts) of new material embedded at the start of their 2-disc Songs for a Nervous Planet album, which was otherwise a really good live best-of compilation. I listened to that EP independently of the rest of the album frequently, which caused those songs to dominate the list. Just to see what the Top 10 have looked like without those songs, here are the next five in the list:

  1. “And Love Goes On,” Earth, Wind & Fire
  2. “Turns the Love to Anger,” Erasure
  3. “Self Control,” Laura Branigan
  4. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” Eurythmics
  5. “Echo Beach,” Martha and the Muffins

Moving on…

Listened to 1,161 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 650 times for a total of 2,881 minutes. (This was the second year in a row that they top my list, and it wasn’t even close.

My top artists, based on song plays:

  1. Tears for Fears
  2. Erasure
  3. Pet Shop Boys
  4. Depeche Mode
  5. Barenaked Ladies
  6. Duran Duran
  7. Eurythmics
  8. New Order
  9. Suzanne Vega
  10. Ghost

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, Suzanne Vega would fall out of the Top 10, and The Alan Parsons Project would move into the 10th spot.

Finally, attempting to determine which album I listened to the most is exceedingly problematic, though I feel I have a very good guess as to how Spotify calculated it. So, without attempting to come up with parameters for filtering and sorting the data in an effort to determine it, I’ll just note that there were two albums released in 2025 that I listened to each over a dozen times: Flying With Angels by Suzanne Vega and Skeletá by Ghost.

My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped)

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As I stated on Bluesky and Facebook yesterday, I only use Spotify to try out new-to-me music before deciding whether I like it enough to purchase it (preferably on CD in order to rip my own high quality digital tracks) and add it to my Apple Music library. Thus, Spotify Wrapped doesn’t properly present my listening this year.

However, last year I planned ahead and at the time Spotify started providing last year’s Wrapped reports to its listeners, I performed an export of the listening stats and associated song data from my Apple Music library. Then when this year’s Wrapped reports went out, I did another such export. Thanks to some decent Excel skills, I was able to create a similar report without having my data mined.

Here are the expanded stats:

Listened for 57,404 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so.)

Played 4,922 songs (I frequently shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, Florence + The Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over,” 40 times.

The top song leaderboard:

1.  “Dog Days Are Over,” Florence + The Machine
2.  “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson
3.  “Dear God,” Black Landlord
4.  “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen
5.  “Gronlandic Edit,” of Montreal
6.  “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” KISS
7.  “Off the Wall,” Michael Jackson
8.  “Rapture,” Blondie
9.  “My Demons,” Tears for Fears
10.  “West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys

Listened to 1,183 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 715 times for a total of 3,179 minutes. (This was the year I deep-dived into their catalog, listening for the first time to four different albums, which included this year’s new album of concert tracks plus five new songs.)

My top artists, based on song plays:

1.  Tears for Fears
2.  Erasure
3.  Barenaked Ladies
4.  Pet Shop Boys
5.  Duran Duran
6.  Weezer
7.  They Might Be Giants
8.  The Decemberists
9.  Eurythmics
10.  The Alan Parsons Project

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, They Might Be Giants would fall out of the Top 10 all the way to 14th, and Depeche Mode would move into the 10th spot. TMBG really do write songs that are much shorter on average than those released by nearly all other bands.