Jan. 17, 2025
Having recently completed my review of 2024’s best albums, I’ve been reflecting on what a strange year it was for me in terms of the music I listened to. According to my Last.fm annual report, I listened to 51% more music in 2024 compared with 2023 (and 2023 was itself a peak listening year). Moreover, I listened to 709 artists, of which 37% were new discoveries. I listened to over 2 albums a day apparently, with Acopia being the album I listened to most often. Apparently I was the 11th top listener on Last.fm of my number 1 album of the year Letter to Yu by Bolis Pupul.
Last.fm says it would describe me as a nostalgic, versatile, explorer, which it pretty much has to as it’s competing with absurd micro-genres that Spotify uses in its Unwrapped product to reassure advertisers about its customer segmentation capabilities. Honestly, Spotify is as rubbish as Twitter or whatever the hell they’re calling that these days.
I had a listening streak of 134 days! It was probably longer as I don’t always log what I play on the record player. The gaps are lot longer than the streaks anyway. But more tellingly, about 80% of the music I listened to last year was released in the 2020s. Some of it by artists from the 90s and 00s as my top 10 shows, but still. I think this was enabled by the Albums app, which is an albums focussed music player for iOS. You can build collections of albums and my main focus last year was one consisting of all the albums released in 2024. (Sometimes reissues count, depending on how they’re labelled in Apple Music - e.g. Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works Vol. II” 30th anniversary reissue was included in the 2024 collection.)
The Albums app is also quite didactic about playing albums all the way through, which has always been my preference. I haven’t worked out how to build playlists yet and I’m not sure I want to. I’ve enjoyed getting to know albums as they’ve been released. It helps that albums are all getting shorter thanks to the vinyl renaissance. I’ve also enjoyed sticking with albums and revisiting them through the year, it functions as a way of keeping in touch with culture. It’s something I can recommend as the news gets worse and worse!
The app also has its own statistics, telling me that in 2024 I listened to 609 hours of music that was released in 2024 and 104 hours of music that was released in 2023. The closest years after that were 1994 (all those listens to the original “Selected Ambient Works Vol. II”) and 2022, each with about a day’s worth of listening.
Of course, I’ve no idea whether 2025 will follow the same trend or not. There are no releases that I am particularly excited about at the moment and January is a pretty fallow time for music releases. Also because I really like my 2024 top ten (and more besides), I’m continuing to listen to those. I haven’t set up a 2025 collection yet!
To return to the title of this post, albums matter. While there is something magical about a skilfully constructed playlist that weaves through different artists and genres. Bolis Pupul made a fantastic mix for Tim Sweeney’s Dancing In Space show, and so did Jorkes, as did DJ City. They get included as albums in the app, which is fun. But an album by an artist, expressing a vision of how they see the world, that’s a serious thing. It has the potential to give us more time absorbing a different point of view rather than scadding around (but some albums are the latter rather than the former) and maybe in the age of social media burnout and brain rot, that might help us.
If you have an iOS device I really recommend Albums the app. (Also, when I was starting out with it, I had some trouble getting things to work and the developer Adam replied really quickly and helped me fix things. His newsletter is also pretty entertaining but I won’t link to it because it’s on Substack.)