More frivolous music habit stats crunching: 2025 edition
2026 is here and before we enter into the new year in the earnest (and hope it is better than the last one, though let's see how that goes after my hellish work deadline month of January is done and dusted), time to do one last bit of retrospective 2025 contemplation, in form of some extremely nerdy stats crunching about my music purchase and listening habits, courtesy of the spreadsheets I keep and scrobble stats I diligently keep up to date (if you use last.fm, listen to physical media and haven't heard of OpenScrobbler, it's going to change your life).
Last year I lamented that I did not have any prior year data to compare against, as 2024 was the first year I kept track of various details in respect of what I buy. For 2025, we can of course then contrast and compare against last year's stats, and isn't that just exciting?
(and no, I'm not mad enough to track down how much money I've spent. That'd be depressing)
In 2025 I bought a total of 163 releases (give or take a couple of random Bandcamp things I may have forgotten to log but I am typically quite diligent). As usual, the album is the king and accounts for approx. 2/3rds of my annual purchases.
There's a couple of changes compared to last year which hint at my shifting priorities/projects. The amount of singles I've bought has dropped from a whopping 27% of all my purchases to a measly 9.2% - having finished my Manics and R.E.M. single catalogue binges for now (some still remain but are a tad pricey to buy on a whim), the only singles I've been buying have been random things I've come across and a bunch of Chumbawamba singles I didn't already have. However, those are much fewer in numbers, as you can tell from the pie charts. In comparison, the amount of Sonic the Hedgehog related releases (which, yes, deserve their own category) has gone up from 4.2% to 7.4% as I've spent the year hunting down various miscellaneous offers and random side releases (e.g. some of the early 90s Eurodance releases with dubious licensing).
The country of origin stats reflect the changes already highlighted above - when you're not buying tons of R.E.M. singles, the amount of US-originated releases drops right down.
Shout-out to Bałtyk who's single-handedly responsible for Poland getting its own named entry in the pie chart, courtesy of the CD reissues of the back catalogue.
The stats for the places I've bought music from are mainly just a neat thing to reflect on. These stats aren't quite 1:1 with last year's as I made an effort to split everything accurately this year, instead of having entries like "Misc Finnish shops" - though I still have a misc entry for random 2nd hand shops (read: flea markets in my Finnish home town). I think for next year I'll tag the countries too after the record shops.
The detail for the decade of origin (and brand new 2025 music as its own stats) only serves to highlight what has been apparent for long enough for anyone who looks at my music habits. Most invested in music from the 1990s onwards, the classic rock years are a barren wasteland (mainly supported by ad hoc occurrences like continuing to pick up random Bowie albums physically).
New to 2025, here's a genre breakdown. I've chosen to use very basic, wide-reaching umbrella genres for this rather than go really deep into subgenres; that's par for the course on how I operate anyway, but also makes these pie charts a bit more legible. Again, no big surprises here - I'm an indie dweeb through and through. Who had a lo-fi beats phase earlier this when my head simply needed some chill sounds to vibe to, enough for it to pick up in the chart.
Let's then turn to Last.FM's annual report to look at what I've listened to, more specifically.
It's no surprise that Pet Shop Boys took the #1 artist position, given bulk of my discography re-listen and re-litigation project took place in 2025. The same can be applied for most of the artists in the most scrobbled list - Pinegrove and Chumbawamba have undertaken discography review projects as well, and I binged through The Beatles' discography following my dad's passing as I took ownership of his box set. It's only the Manics at #5 which is a real surprise - they are one of my favourite bands of all time and they did release a new album this year, but I guess I'm just surprised at how much I actually listened to them overall? The most scrobbled album isn't also a surprise - the Sonic Racing CrossWorlds official soundtrack has a total of 208 songs and though some of those are jingles that run too short of scrobbling thresholds, that amount of tracks is going to have some weight. I probably listened to these more than I even had the chance to scrobble.
The top scrobbled songs stats also make sense in retrospect, for most parts. How "Dear Stephen" from the new Manics album made it all the way to #3 is rather random, but I suppose I did return to it more than on average because of the heated discussions about the song in one of the Discord communities I'm in; just had to keep coming back to check that yup, it's a good song alright.
What does all this tell us? Absolutely nothing. But stats are fun and it's interesting to see how certain patterns have changed within a year, or what impact how the year has gone has had on my purchase and listening habits. It also does show just how much goddamn music I buy - I desperately need to get those new shelves.
Let's check in on this again in a year's time.