Frivolous end of year stats crunching on my music purchasing
At the start of 2024 I decided to do something stupid and come up with yet another way of tracking the music I would buy during the year (besides my already existing inventories in Music Collector, Discogs and RYM). The motivation was mainly just to keep track of some of the less meaningful minutiae involved in buying music: things like where I bought it from, what kind of music it was, etc. Things that, if all went well, could potentially provide some nonsense nerdy insight into my consumer habits after the 12 months had finished.
So a spreadsheet was created, and now that we're almost in 2025 I may as well crunch through the data given I spent all this time working on it. Even if, in the end, nothing truly exciting was revealed (spoilers). But I suppose it does give another angle to the question of what I spent 2024 listening to, besides the top list and what my Last.FM scrobble stats will eventually reveal.
The best place to start the breakdowns is looking at the types of purchases, just because these will end up explaining some of the other stats later down the line.
As always, the album is the king when it comes to my listening habits, but you can quickly detect a couple of 2024's biggest shopping trends for me. Singles as the #2 most purchased format, at a whopping 27%, is a ludicrous result for the year of our lord 2024, but there it is. CD singles are one of my all-time favourite formats and I've always kept my eye out for interesting ones when I've been record shopping. A couple of years back I suddenly came to the dawning realisation that there's actually nothing stopping me from actively seeking these out: they don't cost much at all (unless you go for some of the regional issues which gets hit by international post rates to the UK - and I have gone for them as well) and you can easily find them in Discogs, eBay, wherever. I've therefore started to make a more defined point about obtaining them and trying to complete particular collections. In 2024 I tried to complete a collection of R.E.M. CD singles (finished the year with a handful of gaps for rarer issues), bought all the major label singles for Mew and grabbed a few random whim ones along the way to start up the next set of collections. So, the amount of singles bought has exploded this year - not that we have stats from last year to compare against.
The other trend are Sonic-related purchases, which I've isolated into their own tract, taking up 4.2% of my year's purchases. This doesn't sound much but it's pretty sizeable given how back catalogue Sonic soundtracks aren't exactly everyday items to bump into, and in the past couple of years you'd typically maybe only expect me to buy 1-2, if any. Again, this comes following a realisation that as a working adult I have some spare cash to indulge in some of my most particular of whims, and I know which sites to check for during those idle late nights when the dangerous urge to "just browse around a bit" rises; also, Paypal's pay-in-3 function is an awfully convenient way to split some of the bigger purchases into more budget-friendly chunks without the danger of an eternally growing credit card bill. Completely self-indulgent purchases but I love owning these, and I can't imagine stopping now - though I also don't expect to be as frivolous next year with these, given some of the most glaring omissions in my shelf still cost a little bit too much for even me.
The origin of the artists (etc) I've been buying goes a little hand in hand with the earlier comments. USA is most represented, largely thanks to my all-year binge of R.E.M. singles - without them, I imagine the States wouldn't be in such a dominant place. The Japan purchases are mostly, though not all, Sonic soundtracks. Finland sees a bit of a burst this year by making up 12% of my music bought, and we have my mom to blame for that - she's gotten really into flea markets and there are several in my old home town alone. It's really easy to pick up various nostalgic or otherwise interesting Finnish CDs when you come across them for mere pocket change, and I've left Finland twice this year with a ludicrous amount of second hand CDs in my luggage. This year I also got into J. Karjalainen, a veteran of the Finnish rock scene who's been active and massively popular since the 1970s - he's got Bowie amounts of albums and you can really easily find them everywhere, including said flea markets, so I've been binge buying his discography this year.
Shout-out to the one album I tagged as 'international' which doesn't even show up on the pie chart: it's Billy Bragg & Wilco's second Mermaid Avenue collaboration album.
The chart for the source of purchases rides along the back of the previous comments, as well. "Misc Finland" is basically a number of different second hand shops in my home town, while Discogs represents the bulk of my single and soundtrack purchasing. "Misc NL" and "Misc USA" hint at my habit of picking up music during holidays, while I've itemised the various local record shops I use - Manchester's Piccadilly Records is still my go-to for brand new music purchases, courtesy of its preorders often arriving a day before the release day. I haven't been quite as active with Bandcamp this year as I was last year, but it still makes up a good chunk of my purchases and bears the bulk of my digital-only buys. I try not to buy music from Amazon where possible but the 1.1% here is thanks to one digital album being unavailable anywhere else (that didn't require me to set up brand new accounts for a single purchase) and one best-of-bunch offer on a reissue I had my eyes on.
I did also separately track what the amount of digital vs physical purchases was, but that's a really boring data field for me - given the only physical format I buy are CDs, it's really just a CD/digital split heavily in favour of the former. The single interesting data point in this relation is what the weighting in that respect is with by Bandcamp purchases - for anyone curious, five out of my 17 Bandcamp purchases (29%) were CDs.
I also split the purchases by decade, while highlighting 2024 on its own just to get a benchmark of current year music vs the rest - 21.7% is pretty dang good! To no one's surprise 1990s and 2000s reign supreme, though again we can point out the fact that I've been buying a whole bunch of singles promoting albums from the two decades. The 1960s just peeps in and that's solely thanks to my dad who gifted me a copy of Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society.
So, what's the take home? Mainly the fact that I bought a lot of music and listing it down in a spreadsheet like this really hammers that down to an uncomfortable degree. It is fun to look at some of the trends, but I can't say I'm an interesting enough music buyer to derive truly intriguing shopping trends from. This mainly highlights what I already knew - lots of singles, lots of Finnish 2nd hand shopping - but in its own way it's neat to see it too. I'm not sure if I'll continue doing this into 2025, but then again... it would be potentially curious to see what at least one direct year vs year comparison looks like? Hmm...