Year in Music '22

2022 marked the year that I went to my first actual concert. By actual concert I mean a concert that I paid for for an artist I wanted to see, in an actual concert hall. And, of course, I listened to a lot o songs thorough the year. This is the recap of 2022 in Music. Let’s see what I’ve been listening to this year.

I want to preface this article by mentioning that I mostly use Spotify to listen to music and Last.fm to track (almost) all of my scrobbles. Last.fm is connected to both Spotify and my browser, such that it also detects any other music I may play through my web browser. I am also the owner of some vinyls, but I don’t go through the trouble of adding those scrobbles.

Last.fm has a very nice API that allows me to download all of my history very easily. Even though I use their API to fetch the most data I can about my listening habits, Last.fm also provides a set of statistics on their website. Those statistics are what I am mostly sharing now, since they already provide a very good aggregation of data that I would have to fetch from multiple APIs and then aggregate myself.

🎤 Artists

Regarding artists, we see Years & Years, Marina and Lorde at the top, which does not surprise me. Except for maybe Lorde, most of these artists are somewhat pop-ish style. It’s also quite interesting to see that all the artists I saw live this year are in my top 10, even for artists that I did not know that much, such as MØ.

💿 Albums

Unsurprisingly, my top albums of the year are from the top artists I’ve listed to to. It’s quite funny to see that two versions of the same album (Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land) got to the Tpp 10. If I were to count it as one, it would likely go up to second place.

🎵 Songs

Not as interesting as the albums and artists, but, for the record, I am also keeping here the top 50 songs of the year. Nevertheless, it is curious to see that the songs I’ve listened to the most are not necessarily by the same order as the albums I have listened to the most. I guess it means that some songs really got stuck in my head thorough the year.

🎫 Concerts

Not only did I go to my first real concert in 2022, but also went to perhaps way too many. I saw Marina, Lorde, MØ, Tove Lo and Lady Gaga. They were all incredible in their own way and I am grateful I was able to attend all of them. Living in The Netherlands, it is very easy to go to a concert because almost all artists end up coming here. It’s a massive difference when compared to Portugal, where only the top of the top may go to Portugal if they’re doing a very very large tour.

🎁 Spotify Wrapped

I always distrust Spotify Wrapped a bit. For one, it is published at the beginning of December. Yes, it definitely is a good way to have an overview about what I listened to during the year. However, it doesn’t include the last month of the year, which can change the statistics. Nevertheless, I am including it here so that I can have a comparison between my own data and Spotify’s Wrapped.

We can see, unsurprisingly, that not everything in Spotify Wrapped matched the actual tops of the year, since it is missing the month of December. However, it is not that far away. Supercut, by Lorde, was the top 1 song of 2022, by 1 single scrobble! The remaining statistics, however, match what I saw through Last.fm.

Finally, some quick statistics: in 2022, I scrobbled 23 823 times, with an average of 65 scrobbles per day. In total, I listened to 54 days, 7 hours of music. My most popular genres, from the most popular to the least popular, are pop, electronic, lo-fi, electropop and indie.

Let’s see how the new year goes in terms of music listening!