rhapsodic.org is a weblog by Valette Keller

The Beat Is On

Kottke listed his most-played songs this afternoon, and it got me thinking about mine.

I do most of my music-listening while I'm at work. Some days I meticulously pick album after album, sometimes I have to hear a specific song that has bore itself into my brain all morning. Other days I set my entire collection on random and hear some Liszt after Garth Brooks after Queen. I also have a playlist of the songs I've downloaded from free mp3 blogs and then rated favorably; this playlist, currently 307 songs long, I listen to most often.

So it doesn't surprise me that my most-played songs are from indie artists:

• The Format - The Lottery Song (117 plays)
• Erik Ostrom - I Am Tempted (101 plays)
• Iron & Wine - Naked As We Came (101 plays)
• Matt Costa - Sunshine (99 plays)
• The Bicycles - Paris Be Mine (96 plays)
• Muse - Map of the Problematique (95 plays)

100 songs in my library have been played 50 times or more; 348 have been played 30 times or more.

Alternatively, 7151 songs have been played fewer than 5 times, and 3059 songs have been played only once.

Some of these rarely-played tracks are Christmas songs, but a lot of them are either albums I've had forever and just have grown tired of, or songs that I downloaded from mp3 blogs that didn't make an impression on me the first time I listened to them. I probably should get rid of them, but maybe I stepped away from my desk or answered the phone when it played? And maybe it's really good I just missed it?

I don't know when I would ever go back through them to find out, though. Maybe when I finally run out of room on my iPod I will get rid of all of those duds.

What are your most-played songs?