I’ve been experimenting off and on with tracking the music I listen to for about a year now, but I think I’m finally finished for good.
listenbrainz
I started out with ListenBrainz, a free listen tracking site from the same creators as MusicBrainz, which I use as a source for music metadata.
It worked well and I enjoyed seeing its insights, but there were two major things that kept me from fully embracing it:
- The statistics lagged significantly behind, often by as much as a week. I’ve since looked into their data storage structure and it sounds like the backend is a bit of a mess, so it’s not too surprising processing everything takes so long.
- I was never really comfortable with all the data on everything I listen to being public. I ended up suffering through that in the interests of having the data for myself, simply not giving people the link to my profile, but it still bugged me.
maloja
After a while, I switched to using Maloja, which solved both of those issues. However, it brought its own:
- The ListenBrainz-compatible API never worked for me, so I had to code my own script to manipulate the API from cmus, the terminal-based music player I use.
- The script I threw together for myself had some issues that would make me change my listening habits a bit, though that was my own fault.
Eventually, frustrated, I stopped tracking my music completely. A couple months later, a new Maloja release added some features I hoped for, so I’ve been using it again for the couple months, but I’m finally quitting again.
When it comes down to it, I just don’t care enough. I never actually missed having my listen data during the period I wasn’t tracking it, and I don’t think the insights I gained were meaningful to me in any way. It just felt fun to collect all that information and look at the pretty graphs it spat out.
what now?
I still have all the data from both Maloja and ListenBrainz backed up. If I ever change my mind, I can begin tracking again and pick up where I left off. But I don’t think I will. Listening to music is relaxing to me, and adding the overhead of tracking what I listen to was frustrating.
What I might do is code up a quick script for my own purposes to keep a log of listens locally, probably just a timestamp and path to a music file. Then, someday, if I wanted, I could analyze that.
But for now, I don’t think I will. I wanna just listen to my music and enjoy it, not track what I listen to. My listening habits are completely up to my whims and don’t need to be tracked or analyzed.
Do you scrobble or otherwise track your music listens? How has that gone for you? I’d love to hear from you, my email address is below.
