Do play stats impact your listening habits?

I've been collecting my play stats using a media manager application (J River Media Center) for about a year and a half now and have started to use them to shape my listening habits. Besides being useful for making random playlists of things I've never listened to or haven't listened to recently, I've been looking through my library and thinking, "Wow, I haven't played this great artist/album/song in the last 18 months? I must get to it today!" and specifically queuing them up. In fact I'm going to try to play everything in my library (on my 160g iPod) which at my current rate will probably take 3 more years. :-P

How do you use your play stats, if at all?

I deleted my last.fm ages ago because it had a v.mild negative effect on me in terms of making me self-conscious&because it was no use to me.

I have a playlist consisting of tracks with zero plays; once in a while I try to take on a big chuck of that list to weed out the bad and discover the good.

Other than that, no.

*chunk*

I have a playlist called "New Albums", and then a smart one that looks for tracks in it I haven't played. I wish you could set parameters on what constitutes a "Play" in iTunes.

Mark OTM with what it means to "play" a song. My wife laughs at me sometimes because I insist on letting the track play through to the end, rather than skipping to the next during the last 3 or 4 seconds of silence.

Music comes from so many places--vinyl, CD, cassettes, MP3s, streams--that iTunes "plays" don't really mean anything in my life

a guy i know once listened to the entire charles bronson discography, which consists of hundreds of >minute long powerviolence song, they're still his most played artist.

They don't affect my listening habits but I look at stats a lot just because I like stats.

They don't affect me much, but from time to time I look for albums Songbird tells me I haven't listened to since downloading and put them on.

Conversely, sometimes I see something I don't really remember listening to has a lot of plays, and at that point I like to work out whether it's a) a grower which deserves more attention or b) so boring that I keep thinking I haven't heard it, putting it on, and still forgetting it immediately afterwards.

last.fm has made me aware that I'm a pretty faddish listener and that my stats don't really reflect what I would think of as my favourite music, but I haven't really done anything about it apart from occasionally feel a bit guilty while listening to someone who I think is overrepresented in my last.fm stats.

(e.g. my top artist became my top artist because I had a double-CD of theirs on repeat as background music for a bit, and also they're still releasing new material fairly often which gives them an advantage over some now-defunct old favourites, etc)

Yes, they seriously impact my listening habits, because I have a tendency to hoard music that I "want" to hear, and never bother hearing it. So stats, esp. play counts of 0, give me a way of knowing that this is what's going on. Right now I am trying to listen to everything on this present laptop (about 180 gigs) at least once. I'm about 1/4 of the way through it. It's really great! E.g. I bought a bunch of the Cure 2 disk remasters last year but am only now getting around to listening to them. It means my last.fm stats are looking weird since they're now in my top 10 and they're surely not one of my ten most loved bands, not even close, but that's ok, it'll even out as I listen to everything.

I used to use my iTunes 'Top 25 Most Played' as a playlist, then started getting paranoid that this was becoming self-fulfilling and certain tunes were getting more love than they deserved. So I stopped, but the paranoia seed had sprouted and now when one of those Top 25 comes up (Babyshambles!) it gets skipped unless it's really, truly what I want to listen to at that moment. It's a bit inhibiting and not even slightly worth the effort, but on the plus side random fires in my neighbourhood are way down.

I have smart playlists for "play count=0" and "year=2009 + unrated", which I sometimes stick on shuffle when commuting.

I insist on letting the track play through to the end, rather than skipping to the next during the last 3 or 4 seconds of silence.

Me too. Conversely, when I need to turn music off, I make sure I hit stop/pause instead of mute.

I started keeping track of this stuff a couple of years ago, even regularly copying my Top Ten smart playlist into a new playlist so I can see how it changes over time. I thought that, over the years, it would become more and more illuminating. Instead it has become less and less illuminating.

I also have an elaborate rating system which is mostly useless because there is still gigabytes worth of shitty, boring dubstep I downloaded in 2007 and, well, life's too short for dubstep. I set myself a goal of listening to everything at least once and, if I still wanted to delete it, awarding it one star (meaning candidate for deletion). Zero stars means not listened to yet. But I'm tired of looking at all this stuff and having it come up on smart playlists. Time for a ruthless, ruthless pruning of the library.

life's too short for dubstep.

LOL. :D

ha