Which three artists do you have the most songs by in your iTunes?

Tom Waits (151 items)
David Bowie (105 items)
The Beatles (81 items)

How cannonical.

Sorry, this was an extremely boring thread idea. I'm hungover.

Grateful Dead (562)
Longmont Potion Castle (344)
Gucci Mane (282)

The Who (160)
Bowie (70)
Fleetwood Mac (39)

(snoball refills pipe and looks for slippers)

1. Stereolab (217)
2. Sonic Youth (195)
3. Beach Boys (134)

I think some of the items may be duplicates, but even accounting for that, I'm reasonably sure that's the top three.

how can one find out this information?

Not sure how to do this easily in MediaMonkey, but I'm pretty sure my top artists would be:

Johann Sebastian Bach (292)
Steve Roach (232)
Cocteau Twins (151)

Also in the running:

Coil (137)
Tom Waits (127)
Dead Can Dance (160) (includes Lisa Gerrard solo/collaborations)
Sussan Deyhim (126) (includes collaborations)

Igor Stravinsky (222)
Ryuichi Sakamoto (143)
Johann Sebastian Bach (130)

oh fuck, I forgot: PRINCE (326)

Johann Sebastian Bach (88)
Radiohead (75)
Jorge Ben (68)

Merle Haggard (80)
Waylon Jennings (76)
Townes Van Zandt (55)

Bootlegs throw off the numbers pretty drastically.

Bob Dylan (1112)
Robyn Hitchcock (1102)
The Beatles (729)

The Beatles just edging out Neil Young (717)

Atmosphere (476)
KRS-One (210)
Gucci Mane (196)
Mister Rogers (168)
K'naan (147)
Mary J. Blige (135)
Busy Signal (129)
Chalie Boy (127)
The Clash (127)
Cocteau Twins (123)

Mostly reflects what I've been searching the past year--I still listen to CDs.

yes, how do i count the songs--no sarcastic non-responses pls...thks!

I did it the hard way in itunes -- select all the tracks by the artist, start to drag them like I was going to put them in a playlist, and the number of tracks shows up next to the cursor.

Frank Zappa - 467
John Zorn - 365
Brian Eno - 224

crafty, totem--thanks

unless you have a really old version of itunes, you can just turn the browser on (view -> browser) and select an artist's name, and you'll see something like "45 songs, 3.4 hours, 228.2 MB" on the grey bar at the very bottom of the window. then you can just scroll down the artist list and keep track of which artists you have the most songs by. tedious, but still easier than WmC's method (not hatin).

oh, cool

I'm just not going to scroll through 865 artists for this, so the answer is:

Robyn Hitchcock (an assload of songs)
The Fall (a whole lot of songs)
Fleetwood Mac (so very many songs)

Pretty predictable. Needs to be an artist w/a long career and reasonable quality control throughout.

Neil Young 828
The Fall 777
Guided By Voices 724

the fall
lindstrom
half man half biscuit

It's The Fall, Robyn Hitchcock & XTC for me, love to my fellow Hitchcockians!

Stereolab (151)
Low (129)
Cocteau Twins (117)

yo la tengo (1108)
afghan whigs (522)
the beatles (446)

beatles (193)
bob dylan (164)
sonic youth (137)

Bob Dylan (152)
The Velvet Underground (146)
Lee Hazlewood (130)

The Beatles (438)
They Might Be Giants (365)
Sonic Youth (289)

pavement - 225
beatles - 215
my bloody valentine - 83

despite, mbv happens to be my favorite band; followed by pavement. beatles i care little for anymore.

somebody needs to write an iTunes scanner widget so I don't have to sit here goin "I wonder who I have a lot of stuff by"

I would guess my top three are Amy Grant, Prince Far I, and me

You can enter the artist's name in the search bar and it will tell you how many songs you have by them.

I know but first I'd have to think of which artists to guess at

that's asking rather a lot I think

I DQ'd the Beatles from my search btw because I have a bunch of their albums in there twice and haven't bothered to clean out the dupes yet.

I've no way of really measuring this, but in my case it's definitely
Bob Dylan at no.1, as I've shed-loads of his stuff (not least cos there's loads of it...).
Probably followed by Keiji Haino (incl. Fushitsusha).
And then it's difficult to say what is no.3 - maybe Bowie or Grateful Dead or American Music Club/Mark Eiztel.
But (and this is where I cheat) my old-time banjo folder, full of various banjo players is an important "block" of music for me in my music library, as I love listening to (and playing) the banjo -- it's probably bigger than some of the above.

I DQ'd the Beatles from my search btw because I have a bunch of their albums in there twice and haven't bothered to clean out the dupes yet.

I've got the same problem with Dusty Springfield, who would have come out on top with 567 because of all the redundant Best Ofs, box sets, live tracks and the differences between the US vs. UK albums. Without repeats, it's something like 273.

David Bowie - 604
The Cure - 533
The Fall - 516

All purchased CD tracks, no downloads, etc.

rip money

gucci mane - 411 (this is including features i guess, and i still don't have half of his early stuff)
pavement - 434 (lots of live stuff)

uh, idk what else

Gustav Mahler - 156
Neil Young - 141
The Zombies - 119

Before I looked all these up in iTunes I'd have guessed Prince (~450), Sonic Youth (~375) or the Beach Boys (~500) as well.

Mountain Goats (299)
Pavement (282)
R.E.M. (218)

!muy canonical!

Dylan (1249)
Neil Young (1147)
Miles Davis (744)

That's a little pared-down for each of those artists as this iTunes library is on my laptop; probably add 200-300 to each artist for the "real" number.

Miles Davis (108 songs)
Ornette Coleman (106 songs)
Neil Young (88 songs)

Aphex Twin (131) (226 inc. alternate names)
Future Sound Of London (54)
Stereolab (47)

(but this is my home laptop so I don't have much of any one thing)

Does ILX really love Neil Young this much or is it more that he's got a lot of songs?

of montreal 193
stereolab 185
hood 183

but if we count different projects by same person it is bob wratten at 207.

on my netbook i only have about 1,000 tracks, of those the top three artists are:

1 yo la tengo 20
2 the go-betweens 16
3 neil young 14

multiplication by 30 should give a realistic estimate of the real total.

A cursory glance suggests:

Melvins
Drexciya
Electric Wizard

Easy way is to just select all in your itunes music library, copy and paste it into excel. Then use a pivot table to get a count of songs by artist.

I'm not posting mine.

I think mine's

Current 93
Will Oldham
Abba

I suspect mine's going to be The Fall, Half Man Half Biscuit and Stereolab.

It's all bands that I'm in. When recording an album, I end up with tons of different rough mixes of each track...

how boring:

Neil Young (823)
Beatles (558)
Miles Davis (543)

lots of duplicates in the Beatles, but whatevs.

Low
Willie Nelson
Van Morrison

mountain goats
prince
notorious big

neko case, bob dylan, and big pun are all pretty close

should maybe do this by hours of music rather than number of songs

#1 is Grateful Dead with 770, would have to think about others, maybe Flaming Lips with 360.

The Fall (275)
Sparks (239)
Stereolab (209)

Pet Shop Boys, Prince and Saint Etienne would be the next highest, all with around 200 songs each.

1. The Beatles (153)
2. Big Star (122, some duplication between box set and albums)
3. Spoon (116)
Then there were several artists at around or just over 100 (Aphex Twin, Guided by Voices, The Kinks, MArvin Gaye, Pixies, Radiohead, Wire, Townes Van Zandt, Yo La Tengo)

just going by my music at work, which is a very modest subset of my total music, the leaders are

durutti column (99)
severed heads (87)
for against (83)

at home i think guided by voices are way in front

seems like Arthur Russell, Byrds and Boredoms

Charlie Parker
Jandek
Stanley Brothers

Iunno how to do this with Foobar but I'm guessing it'd be:

Bjork
Spacemen 3
Mouse on Mars

At work it is...

Aphex Twin (120)
Stereolab (65)
Lindstrom (& buddies) (59)
Future Sound of London (56)
Erkin Koray (52)

I have no idea why I have so much FSOL. I suppose because all their albums are about 75 minutes long and come with 8 million remixes. It's only 3 albums worth.