TomRed's blog & stuff

Like most, I like music. Like most, the amount of compatible music for me is finite. A year ago today I discovered, or perhaps rediscovered, The Beatles. I remember browsing YouTube that on that August 26th day and stumbling into She Loves You. In instantly recognising the 1963 classic I dived into many more and gathered before too long that many, many songs from the back of my head were by the band.

Their influence put up a good fight to monopolise my iTunes library, and they didn’t do too bad, they even made my favourite song. I have exactly 300 songs (a humble count in the eyes of many), with exactly one third from The Beatles. My interest in them leaked into discovering the music from the minds of many others from their day, shaping my now definable music taste. As today has brought together a few milestones, I feel like honouring a post to this, i.e. my library of music.

Here are some data (there’s some colour for the geographers):
Proportion of songs by artist (minimum 5 songs to be included):

The huge contribution from The Beatles does make this look like a ’60s peace symbol. Relating from that, I think it’s best to tell you now that I am most definitely not a hippie, and in fact would heavily fund efforts to destroy their existence once and for all. I’m not the only one. You can see the other bands and musicians from their day making an impact, and simply unrelated ones like Weird Al. The big chunk to the left contains artists with less than five songs (as said), as otherwise the chart would be less readable than my handwriting (Arabic). It’s important to point out that a major reason for The Beatles’ presence is because of the very, very large discography (so there were inevitably many songs for me to ‘buy’).

Proportion of songs by year:

There’s not much from the ’40s and ’50s; personally, I think the only really good song from then was Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode (1958). The early ’60s sort of sucked in my opinion as well, Bobby Pickett’s Monster Mash (1962) was a good anomaly. The mid-to-late ’60s was, as I am overly conveying, the heyday. The ’70s weren’t bad, nor were the ’80s, but I’ve yet to explore them as I believe I am unqualified to assert that they lack a lot of what I like. As for the 1990s and 2000s, screw ’em. Same for 2010. Musical ignorance is bliss.

Top ten songs by play count:
Help! (The Beatles)
264 plays.
Lux Aeterna (Clint Mansell)
260 plays.
Yesterday (The Beatles)
258 plays.
Still Alive (Portal)
225 plays.
Let It Be (The Beatles)
200 plays.
Octopus’ Garden (The Beatles)
195 plays.
Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles)
188 plays.
With a Little Help from My Friends (The Beatles)
183 plays.
I Feel Fine (The Beatles)
182 plays.
Revolution (The Beatles)
181 plays.

Note that I think that this is a rather unreliable measure of affection, I tend to switch song the second before it finishes as I’m impatient to wait during the brief pause (some songs have very long end pauses, like A Day in the Life. Certain songs I’ve had a lot longer than others, and I might just prefer listening to a live version.

Final article of trivia: exactly (but only) 1% of my library are songs singed by women.

I hope this post has done…something. But fuck it, it’s my blog, I guess I can write about things that only concern me and are of no benefit to others. Sexist TomRed out.