Wrapped

 

There's a popular music listening app that, at the end of the year, looks at your listening stats and tries to summarise it for you. It tells you who your favourite artist is - how many hours you have spent listening to them, and stuff like that. 

Last year, it told me that my favourite song was something that I'd probably listened to about 5 times. I can't even recall what it was but I probably listened to it 5 times on day of release and never again - It probably told me that I didn't really listen to a lot of music (on that app at least) and so it gave me cause to doubt the reliability of the data. 

It did also give me the opportunity to change things around. It mentioned a streak - you listened to a particular song 3 days in a row (or something like that) - I decided that this year, I was going to try and listen to one song every day of the year, and see what that did for my stats. I didn't quite make it for every day but I came pretty close. I chose to listen to Talk Talk's "Life's What You Make It", a classic track and minor hit from 1986 which I have had on 7" since the week after it dropped out of the charts and the single went into the 99p box at Centre News. I don't know why I chose this track - I guess I figured it would be a good track to listen to each day. 

I listened to it 329 times across the year. That sounds like I've missed a whole heap of days, but we're at the start of December and it's not included those days, so I reckon it's probably 329 listens out of 335 days. Not bad going. 

However - the knock-on effect is that I have listened to a lot of relatively similar stuff. Because the nature of the app means I often just ask to listen to that artist, it says that 4 out of my Top 5 albums this year were by Talk Talk. (The other one was the new Idlewild LP) 

It shows that I listened to music by a lot of other 80s bands because the algorithm offers up a lot of similar stuff - Left of Center by Suzanne Vega (coincidentally another song that I bought from the 99p bin) is in my top 5 for the year despite my never consciously choosing to play it, and I have had to block a fair few bands like Simple Minds because I really don't want to listen to them. 

Anyway, as well as listening to "Life's What You Make It" 329 times, the algorithm also tells me that I am in the top 0.002% of Talk Talk fans worldwide, and that I am their 329th biggest listener across the year. I reckon that places me at 329 out of over 16 million listeners to Talk Talk this year. 

Here's my top ten songs of the year, and the number of times I listened to them (yes, there's a lot of Talk Talk in there) 

Talk Talk - Life's What You Make It        329 plays

The Blue Nile - Tinseltown in the Rain    57 plays

Talk Talk - Living In Another World        55 plays

Talk Talk - I Believe In You                     40 plays

Suzanne Vega - Left of Center                   38 plays

Talk Talk - April 5th                                   36 plays

Rilo Kiley - Does He Love You?                36 plays

Talk Talk - Happiness Is Easy                    35 plays

Talk Talk - I Don't Believe In You               27 plays

Talk Talk - Time It's Time                            27 plays

Prefab Sprout, Propaganda and Galaxie 500 all make a play later on. 

Anyway -  it's got me to thinking. If I repeat this in 2026 - how do I become the Number 1 fan of an artist - I thought I was skewing quite obscure with Talk Talk but if 16 million people listened to them as well as me, I guess not that obscure. I've got to go deeper. 

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