Listen…I mean it! There’s nothing that he’s worthy of: he’s just another playa playing in the name of love! The Backstreet Boys said so, so you know it has to be true, right? Well, if you don’t believe that, let me prove it to you in some various ways.

I have been on the grandest “New Millennium” pop music kick in the last few days than I have ever experienced since probably the year 2002. Although I was in my early teens in 2002 – and age most people associate with bad and/or trendy pop music adoration – I stopped listening and paying attention to the vast majority of all popular music in the United States back then. I didn’t like the music that was coming out on top of the charts and taking over the radio airwaves, so I just stopped paying attention. In the long run, I have continued to do that even to now in the year 2010. I like what I like no matter where on the planet it is from. So, really, to me the most recent American pop music I am familiar with is the hoard of stuff from the New Millennium in and around the year 2000. We’re talking Backstreet Boys, Mandy Moore, Britney Spears, NSYNC, Christina Aguilera, Kylie Minogue, and even back to the Spice Girls. Those artists were the biggest phenomenons of my adolescence, and even though they are all mostly still around in the music industry, none of them have been recreated by another act since the new millennium. Nowadays most people look back at the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, and so on as being cookie-cutter, mass-produced, unoriginal, tacky musical groups that were simply for sales and entertaining young girls. You know what? I disagree. Oh yes. Big time.

Lyrically, most of those groups/artists were not the most awesome. I will admit that right off the bat. At that point in the lives of the fans who adored those artists, though, lyrics were one of the least important things possible. When I was 10 years old, lyrics were irrelevant almost entirely. It was the overall feel and vibe from the music – each song and every album – that was what I cared about and related to. I was a fanatical Backstreet Boys fangirl because of one member who was the definition of what I found attractive (and still do, oddly enough, but that is another post entirely) so I had more than just the music to obsess over. The other artists of the time, though, I wasn’t physically attracted to but yet I still adored their music. Looking back at why I enjoyed the music so much now all these years later, it’s pretty obvious to me what it was about these artists and the entire genre that hooked me in so hard.

Every damn song, whether it was a romantic ballad or some upbeat dance track that was choreographed to high hell, exuded with fun. Nothing was ever extraordinarily serious in the music, or at least overtly that way. If a song or album had serious overtones, that was all they were. Nothing was blatantly depressing and whatnot because the music was always meant to make the listener feel better in some way regardless of the topic. The point was to make someone feel good via a form of entertainment. In the end, it wasn’t just entertainment for people like myself who grew up with the phenomenon of 1 million albums sold in a single day by an artist. It was entertainment, sure, but it was also an escape for a few minutes into a totally other world that was ultimately something positive and uplifting.

Listening to music from the new millennium – now a decade old at the least – is so overwhelmingly nostalgic, but it’s also oddly even more fun than I ever could have remembered it. It’s been 10+ years since these songs came out, but hearing them now is almost like experiencing them for the first time all over again. It’s glorious! I highly recommend every single person go and find old music from way back when: it will give you quite a lot of insight into why you liked the music in the first place and how it shaped memories of your past, I guarantee it!

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!