The internet is filled with things. Here is one of them.
The Music Stats Project2023 Dec 11
Sometime in 2007 I finally acted on a thought that'd been bouncing through my brain: "iTunes logs playcounts for tracks, but wouldn't it be great if it did the same for albums and artists, too?" I wrote a script which read an iTunes export file and generated those album and artist playcounts. Since then, I've been periodically exporting my iTunes library to update those counts whilst incrementally improving that script. The biggest step up was in 2018, when I added to the script the ability to compare a recent export against an older one. This created a view into 'recent playcount', thus answering questions such as "What's popular now?" and "What's fallen from favor?" And yet... is it even more insightful if the script, rather than just compare two points in time, compiled all of the static export files into a continuous moving picture of my iTunes library? Or would that be a bunch of work for what is essentially highly-personal trivia? Baby, it's both!
Introducing, sixteen years in the making, the (almost complete) new version of my interactive iTunes library!
Sometime in 2007 I finally acted on a thought that'd been bouncing through my brain: "iTunes logs playcounts for tracks, but wouldn't it be great if it did the same for albums and artists, too?" I wrote a script which read an iTunes export file and generated those album and artist playcounts. Since then, I've been periodically exporting my iTunes library to update those counts whilst incrementally improving that script. The biggest step up was in 2018, when I added to the script the ability to compare a recent export against an older one. This created a view into 'recent playcount', thus answering questions such as "What's popular now?" and "What's fallen from favor?" And yet... is it even more insightful if the script, rather than just compare two points in time, compiled all of the static export files into a continuous moving picture of my iTunes library? Or would that be a bunch of work for what is essentially highly-personal trivia? Baby, it's both!
Introducing, sixteen years in the making, the (almost complete) new version of my interactive iTunes library!