Having a last.fm account is a great way to offer your musical taste to the world at large, no doubt about it. There’s a sort of perverse glee in knowing some gal in Sri Lanka or some dude in Wyoming knows the music I listen to or the fact that I listened to a Gang Starr CD less than a week ago is researchable data. The opposite end of the pendulum is that the temptation to overtrivialize your data is often too much to contain. So to wit, a short look at my milestones during my last.fm tenure, which has…

This blog likely won't mean a lot to anyone living outside Wisconsin or the Upper Midwest. But to today's music fan, there's a lot here that they can relate to…sadly. This weekend (March 13-15) will mark the final weekend of operation for Atomic Records, a local indie record store in Milwaukee, WI. Although I never attended school in Milwaukee, and although there were (and still are) quite a few awesome record stores in my old stomping grounds of Madison, Atomic was special in a way all stores (record or otherwise) should aspire to.

I had first heard of Atomic when…

So, all in all, a pretty interesting year in music – my 2008 includes a lot of old favorites, a couple new faces, and some really tight competition, both for the prestigious number 1 position and elsewhere (there was a **5** way tie for 15th place that had to be resolved!) So let's count down starting with the disc that won the unexpectedly tense battle for 15th….

15. The General Store – Mountain Rescue

So what's so great about this disc that put it above efforts from Gnarls Barkley, Shelby Lynne, Randy Newman and even Coldplay (the four…

As promised, the discs from 2008 I wanted to hear, but for whatever reason would not or did not, so they will be conspicious from their absence from my top 15 tomorrow (which will HOPEFULLY be up tomorrow, lots of busy stuff happening!) \

*Ryan Adams & the Cardinals: Cardinalogy
*Belle & Sebastian: The BBC Sessions
*Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Lie Down in the Light
*Common: Universal Mind Control
*The Dears: Missles
*Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
*Ben Folds: Way to Normal
*Frightened Rabbit: Midnight Organ…

My 2008 list will be here New Year's Day, so until then, let's have a look at last year. Basically, this includes the original tallies of each album I calculated last year and added my records all the way up to late last night. In short, a LOT of new stuff and a lot of movement the further you travel down the list. Here's the old list…

2007 BEST OF (as of 12/30/07)
1. Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
2. Radiohead, In Rainbows
3. Sloan, Never Hear the End of It
4. Idlewild, Make Another World
5. The National, Boxer
6.…

OK, so as I have explained previously, I keep a daily talley of all the albums I listen to from beginning to end. I figured by keeping track of how much I listened to each album, I can determine the album I liked the most that year. Then I could check back on each list year after year to see what changes and how much it changes.
In 2006, I only tabulated that year; last year, I backtracked and counted my 2005 plays to that point as well as an update of '06 and, obviously 2007. I was hoping that…

So seven minutes into Thursday, which here in the States means Thanksgiving morning, my Shuffle reaches from a pool of over 15,000 songs and picks out Butterball (For those unfamiliar with American customs, Thanksgiving dinners almost always feature turkeys as the main course and Butterball happens to be a certain brand of prepared turkey.)

No other comment – just was a tad coincidentifreaky.

I am fairly convinced there's no better grist for a music nut's proverbial mill than an all encompassing "greatest albums of all-time" poll/survey. We've seen a lot, and scoffed at probably a lot more, and now we have another one, thanks to our fine friends at WEXP Radio in Seattle, who presents us with the 903 greatest albums of all time. I have no issues at all with WEXP themselves, as other the years they've had some terrific sessions with a lot of my fave artists (Eels, Broadcast, The Twilight Sad, etc) . But judging by…

Ok, kids, just like 365 days ago I’m going to celebrate my second year of being on last.fm by counting down the artists I’ve scrobbled the most. Unlike last year, we’re counting down from 30 (not 20) and we’ll also keep track of total scrobbles per artist and how they’re moving relative to the rest of the list. (Now, since I only kept track of the scrobble numbers in the top 20, the change in rank compared to last year past the top 20 is only a guesstimate, hence the "about" in the descriptions.)

One year after my first list,…

Wouldn't you know that the same time last.fm gets reconfigured, I attempt to streamline my ITunes, and get it horribly, HORRIBLY wrong? Meanwhile, I'm listening to my iPod while attempting to get all my folders back where they belonged, plus running around from Tuesday til this morning, only to have it completely reformat and erase all the listens I had accumulated during that stretch — a good 400 tracks or so. I am re-running the albums as best as I can remember them on a playlist, which will run until early tomorrow. But this marks the first time since early…