With the recent discovery of the idea that a human will enjoy a feature film more intensely if it appears to be jumping out at them – in 3D! – the whole world has been abuzz around where 3D film is going to take us. Personally, I think it’s going to take our fat asses to even higher rates of childhood obesity, but that’s a little too political, right? Ah, well, then let’s just focus on the pros and cons of 3D film and 3D televisions for now! No matter what you think of 3D “stuff” now, maybe I can change your opinion ever so slightly one way or another. I’m not guaranteeing anything, of course, but that’s between you and your doctor¹.

3D Feature Films: a Win that will Fail eventually.

Blah blah blah blah blah AVATAR blah blah blah. No, I did not see AVATAR in “regular format” or 3D. I had no interest in seeing it when it was released in theaters, and I don’t really rent/buy any DVDs. So, honestly, if it’s on TV one day or something, sure I might just watch it. Regardless of my own enthusiasm to see the film, the whole wave of interest it created in the whole “3D movie” movement was something that really annoyed me. I am not the kind of person who wants to wear a pair of glasses over my head so I can see a movie in 3D. I have never thought 3D crap was cool. OK, maybe I did when I was like 5 years old, but that was it. To be entirely honest, I am not excited by the prospect of all the junk in some action film popping out of the screen at me and supposedly making me feel like I’m “in the movie itself”. Call me a traditionalist or whatever, but I am one of the people in this world who has this thing called an imagination that can make me feel like I’m anywhere just by using my brain! When I read books, yes books with paper, I can transport myself to wherever the thing takes place. Doing the same for a movie being shown on a flat screen is a hell of a lot easier, actually, because all the imagery is created for me. So I have absolutely no idea why a movie patron needs to have parts of the film jumping out at them in order to make them feel like they are in the story. I thought people already did that? Hmm, I guess I assumed humans could do that kind of thing on their own. Damn. Wrong again!

3D Televisions: DO NOT WANT.

Really. I don’t want them. Ever. What in the hell do you need to see on television programming that needs to be in 3D? A movie shown at a theater – with no commercials, mind you – is one thing to have in 3D. Television, though? No thanks. I can sort of understand the prospect of having a 3D television solely to play movies (DVDs or Blu-Ray) in 3D in your home, but then again, having 3D movies at the theater itself makes the 3D DVD/Blu-Rays kind of overkill to me. Just choose one or the other, please. The real fear is that everyday television will become 3D. If anyone suggests putting that forward, we are all doomed. Honestly, do you want to watch The TODAY Show with Al Roker giving you the weather forecast in 3D? Do you need to see American Idol auditions – good and bad – as if the people were performing right in front of you? No. You don’t want either and you definitely do not need either.

Why are we all so obsessed with constant entertainment? I think we all need to go out and do some birdwatching or something before we all become so jaded by mass electronic entertainment that we forget what things really look and act like. So, I say TWO THUMBS DOWN for both. Yeah. After Voyage of the Dawn Treader comes out in IMAX 3D, I am never seeing any other 3D stuff again. Ever.

When a person is up late and fairly bored but has access to the internet, strange things are bound to happen. During my late night internet adventures of March 29th into March 30th, I somehow discovered a rather fascinating web application of sorts that gave me rather detailed information about the music I listen to most often. The application didn’t simply track the number of times I had played a song by a particular artist or how many times overall I had listened to a single artist; the application did all of that, but also graphed how much I listened to an artist and whatnot over various periods of time. When I saw this, I was blown away and thus ended up playing with the application for quite some time just to laugh at my own evolving musical tastes (as the title of this entry suggests). After seeing all of the graphs, though, I knew I wanted to share the statistics with other people and perhaps get others to use the web application themselves to see their own results over time.

I registered with the website Last.fm originally in 2005 and always found the service of simply recording every song I played in iTunes very interesting. Last.fm is an internationally popular website based out of the UK that allows users to create a profile for themselves that displays statistics about what music they listen to through various audio applications. My own profile – which you can access freely at Last.fm if you choose – is similar to most user profiles and generates data based on music tracks I’ve recently listened to (in ‘Recently Listened Tracks‘), the most played artists in my musical library (in ‘User’s Library‘), and even progressive charts spanning from 7 days to over 12 months showing the most played artists and songs in my library (in ‘Top Artists‘ and ‘Top Tracks‘, respectively). Last night, however, I was curious enough to locate a different way of looking at my data through the Last.fm Playground and the free Scrobbling Timeline web application. This is how I generated the graphs and overall statistics for my playing habits that I found too interesting to not share! After examining all the graphs I was able to create, I saved a key few to show how musical taste overall can drastically change over the course of less than two years. My evidence is as follows…

Scrobbling Timeline: 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)

I have listened to Japanese pop artist Ayumi Hamasaki since 2002, so when I registered my Last.fm account she was already well-established in my musical interests. I have a huge amount of music of hers on my iPod, and thus she has consistently been one of my most played artists over time. At the same time, I know I have begun listening to her less and less over the years, so I was curious to see how accurate that assumption was. I thus generated the following overall cumulative timeline graph of how much I listen to Ayumi Hamasaki during the life of my user account:

Ayumi Hamasaki (cumulative timeline) - Click to enlarge to full size for better viewing

This graph displays how many times I have played tracks by Ayumi Hamasaki, how long it took me to reach the total number of played tracks, and what tracks I played at various intervals such as the 1st track and the 1000th track. As the graph shows, I listened to Ayumi Hamasaki enough around mid-2008 (when my account was registered) to reach the play “milestones” of #1 through #100 almost immediately. It took me a good while to reach milestone #500 in early 2009, but then a rather long time to get to play milestone #1000 in mid-2009. Having listened to her an approximate 1,220 times overall, I have only listened to her about 220 times since hitting the #1000 milestone on August 12th, 2009. That was a substantial amount of time ago, and the chart shows how my listening of her music literally “flattened out” after the #1000 play mark. At that rate, it is likely it will take a very, very long time for me to get to the #2000 mark.

Scrobbling Timeline: t.A.T.u.

Similar to Ayumi Hamasaki, I had listened to Russian duo t.A.T.u. for a long time even before I registered my Last.fm account. Though no longer making music together, they released three albums of English music and three albums of Russian music (not including compilation or remix albums) during their career as a duo. On October 21st of 2008, t.A.T.u. released what would be their last Russian album that had been continually a source of frustration for fans because of delays and changes. Upon its release, though, I played it pretty much non-stop. Here is the generated cumulative timeline:

t.A.T.u. (cumulative timeline) - Click to enlarge to full size for better viewing

In total, I have listened to t.A.T.u. the most out of any of the artists in my music library with over 3,500 total plays. I quickly racked up enough plays to reach the first six play milestones – #10 to #2000 – from mid-2008 to only a few days before 2009 hit. Since the release of their last Russian album in October as mentioned previously, I was still enjoying it enough through the beginning of 2009 to hit the #3000 play milestone a few months later on May 18th. It took me seven months to go from 500 to 1000 plays with Ayumi Hamasaki, so in comparison to her, I have listened to t.A.T.u. a heck of a lot more in the same amount of time.

Scrobbling Timeline: Josh Groban

Although he’s been highly active in the music industry since his self-titled debut album was released in 2001, I didn’t really listen to any of Josh Groban’s music until mid-way through 2008. Even then, I only listened to a very select few – perhaps half a dozen – of his songs on occasion. In September of 2009 as the chart below shows, I some how decided I was going to start listening to all of his other music. The results were quite surprising and also very hilarious:

Josh Groban (cumulative timeline) - Click to enlarge to full size for better viewing

According to my Last.fm charts and this graph, when I started listening to a wee bit more of Josh Groban’s music in October 2009 – when I hit the #100 plays milestone – I must have been somewhat intrigued. Starting in January 2010, though, my recorded plays of his music began to increase much more before spiking and going through the roof in February through March. At the beginning of February I had not reached the #500 plays mark, but less than one month later I had already surpassed the #1000 plays milestone. It is now in the very last few days of March entirely and I am nearly up to 1,400 plays, thus making Josh Groban the second most-played artist in my entire library.

I’ve always been aware of changes in preferred music in myself and other people. It’s just a part of life that everyone goes through as we try new things and experience different sounds we were unaware of before. However, most of us don’t get to see the actual data on how our tastes and preferences evolve over a long period of time in a nice diagram! If any of you have a Last.fm account you’ve been using for a while, I highly recommend you check out the application used for the data graphs to see how your own musical interests have changed. You’ll be fascinated and possibly shocked when you see what the numbers reveal!