"What kind of music do you like?" 2024 edition

I cringe when people ask me what kind of music I like. I doubt anyone can give the succinct answer than the person asking the question is expecting. So, if someone really wants to know, I can send them this URL.

Here’s what some website that analysed my Spotify history from the last 12 month says are my favourite genres:

1. Permanent wave

2. Rock

3. Indie folk

4. Alternative rock

5. Indietronica

6. Metropopolis

7. Stomp and holler

8. Pop

9. Indie anthem-folk

10. Chamber pop

Here are 25 artists I listened to the most in the last year:

1. Taylor Swift

2. David Byrne

3. Ludovico Einaudi

4. Charlie Cunningham

5. Sia

6. Brett Dennen

7. Billie Eilish

8. Little People

9. VAST

10. Four Tet

11. Simon and Garfunkel

12. CHVRCHES

13. Coldplay

14. Sinéad O'Connor

15. The Paper Kites

16. Etaoin

17. Tycho

18. R.E.M.

19. Novo Amor

20. Imogen Heap

21. Axel Flóvent

22. The Beatles

23. Of Monsters and Men

24. The Naked and Famous

25. Enya

So, what about my favourite decades for music? I love to discover new music and I’m not particularly nostalgic. However, I feel like every song has a magic number of times it can be played before you just don’t want to hear it anymore. For some songs, that number approaches infinity. For many songs, that number is probably zero or close to it.

If you analyze my Liked Songs, my favourite decade is the 2020s and every decade before it is increasingly less popular. Some of that is because newer songs have had less opportunity to be pruned than older ones. Overplayed tracks and artists from the radio era I don’t really want to hear as much anymore. However, I do think that music does keep getting better decade over decade. Maybe more music is available in streamable format nowadays than in the past. Maybe it’s just evolution.

And here’s a graph of how many songs in my library were released in each decade: