This is every album I listened to in full, tracked week by week, in 2011. It's a total of 275 unique albums. 62 were new acquisitions, 26 were new albums I streamed but didn't buy, and the rest were albums from my collection.
Those 275 albums broken down by year or decade:
2011: 59
2010: 15
00s: 71
90s: 41
80s: 9
70s: 38
60s: 35
50s: 6
40s: 1
Compared to the same sort of statistics around what I actually bought this year, it's notable that the numbers here for the 90s and 60s are so high—those are almost all familiar albums. You can see the same when you break the albums down by genre—note how many "classic indie" (indie from the 80s/90s) I listened to. I didn't actually buy any new-to-me albums that fit that category.
Indie Rock: 99
Classic Indie: 27
Electronic: 19
Ambient: 18
Folk: 16
Krautrock: 15
Alternative: 15
60s rock: 14
Country: 13
70s rock: 12
Jazz: 5
Brasilia: 4
Hip Hop: 4
Holiday: 4
Oldies: 4
Children's: 2
Calypso: 1
Punk: 1
R&B: 1
Reggae: 1
The three albums I played the most often are, not coincidentally, my three favorite albums of the year. Here's a look at the most individual plays of the year:
Feist: Metals (22 plays)
Low: C'mon (19 plays)
Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer (18 plays)
Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues; Radiohead: King of Limbs (15 plays each)
Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony (12 plays)
My Morning Jacket: Circuital (11 plays)
As for those albums that got a lot of plays but didn't wind up on my favorites of the year list—Fleet Foxes, Radiohead, and My Morning Jacket—it's probably safe to say those are the albums I most wanted to love, but didn't.
Looking at which albums spent the most number of weeks in rotation (at least one play in a given week), the favorites don't change much. Everything here wound up on my End of Year list:
Low: C'mon (10 weeks)
Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer (9 weeks)
Feist: Metals (8 weeks)
Harry Belafonte: Calypso; Disappears: Guider; Rene Hell: The Terminal Sympony; Mountains: Air Museum (7 weeks each)
The Belafonte is the only record not made in 2011 to stay in rotation for many weeks (though it was a new acquisition for me this year). Some older records, and longtime favorites in general, crop up more if you add up all the individual spins by artist rather than by album.
Low: 38
Feist: 28
Simon & Garfunkel / Paul Simon: 24 (combined)
Fleet Foxes: 20
Eleanor Friedberger: 18
My Morning Jacket; Radiohead: 17 each
Iron & Wine: 15
Tim Hecker; Radio Dept.; Disappears: 13 each
Rene Hell: 12
Clearly I was on a Low kick for part of this year. Paul Simon is always a mainstay on the family sound system, and now only more so with Coop's growing interest. Radio Dept. and Iron & Wine have been regularly played for years.
Anyway, this is all probably interesting to no one but me. Happy New Year!
Disappears: Little Ghost
My Morning Jacket: Dondante
The Radio Dept.: You Stopped Making Sense
Harry Belafonte: I Do Adore Her
Simon & Garfunkel: The Only Living Boy in New York
Fleet Foxes: Sim Sala Bim
Feist: Undiscovered First
This sounds like a clever way to keep track of how many times you listen to a given record in a year. I might start doing this (keeping track) this year after reading this post.
Posted by: AdenDreamsOf | January 05, 2012 at 07:28 PM