Day: February 11, 2005

Was scrolling through my computerized music collection today and thought to myself: Which bands to I have the most music from on my computer? And now I know:

1. Depeche Mode — 157 songs (lots of remixes in here)
2. The Beatles — 137 songs
3. U2 — 126 songs
4. The Cure — 110 songs
5. Kate Bush — 104 songs
6. Metallica — 100 songs
7. Tori Amos — 82 songs
8. Nine Inch Nails — 70 songs
9. Journey — 68 songs
10. Tie: Tom Lehrer and They Might Be Giants — 67 songs

Artists also represented by more than 50 tracks include Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Sarah McLachlan, Neil Finn/Crowded House/Finn Brothers, Iron Maiden, Billy Joel (I don’t know why I have so much Billy Joel), Waylon Jennings, Howard Shore (the Lord of the Rings soundtracks), Pink Floyd, Oingo Boingo and Yaz(oo)/Alison Moyet/Erasure (oh, come on. Like Alison Moyet and Andy Bell don’t sound the same).

What does it mean? Uhhhh, that I like all those artists? However, some of my favorite artists aren’t on the list, including Daniel Lanois (36 songs in my collection), Brian Eno (47), kd lang (44), fairground attraction/Eddi Reader (36), Emmylou Harris (16), The Pretenders (36), and the La’s (a mere three tracks on my computer). So I wouldn’t necessarily call that top ten entirely representative of my personal tastes.

It’s also not representative of, say, my entire CD collection, since I have a tendency to rip only tracks I want, rather than entire albums. So some bands are underrepresented on my computer, relative to their presence in my CD collection — and newer bands are overrepresented, since I’ve stopped buying CDs as much and started buying more music online.

But it is interesting. As I said, who knew I had that much Billy Joel? It’s not like my iTunes ever seems to play any. What does it know that I don’t?

Who is most represented in your music collection? Because, you know, now I’m curious.

Since a couple of people have asked about it to me in e-mail, a quick reminder:

I’m moderating comments more than seven days old, because that’s the easiest way to stop comment spam from actually showing up on the site. What this means is if you comment on an entry that’s more than a week old, your comment probably won’t show up right away; it’ll show up when I go through the new comments to clear up the comment spam (comment spam still comes in; it just doesn’t show up where you all see it). If a moderated comment is clearly from a human being, I’ll let it through, so, no, I’m not moderating for content (and more than I usually do, which as we all know is not much). I’m just keeping the spam out for your total reading satisfaction.

I did put in a little note about this right above the comment function pages, but I understand that people don’t always read the fine print (I don’t always, either).

On a related note, now that spam doesn’t actually show up on the site, it’s actually kind of fun to clean it out. I enjoy looking at all those Viagra and poker spams stuck in limbo before I delete them into oblivion. It’s the little things, you know?

The one small drawback is every once in a while I accidentally delete a real comment — I deleted one of my own comments this morning, which is sort of embarrassing. So if one of your comments disappears, it’s not censorship, it’s just me being clumsy. Sorry about that.