One of the benefits of listening to college radio: I listen to artists I’ve never listened to before.
My cousin Pete runs a college radio station, WXAV, out of St. Xavier University in Chicago. Every Wednesday from 9am to 11am he does the two-hour show, Rockology. I tune in every week.
Pete plays a great mix of music. He hops from genre to genre. For instance, one time he played back-to-back:
- Progressive bluegrass
- Classical (Beethoven)
- New Wave
- Afropop
One week, I couldn’t listen to the show. I really wanted to hear the songs Pete played. I went to Spinitron to grab the tracks. It’s pretty cool. Spinitron keeps track of every single song that is played on WXAV. I added those tracks to a Spotify playlist so I can listen to this week’s show.
Little tip: I use the free Chrome extension, Data Scraper, to automatically pull the tracks into a Google Sheet. However, I still haven’t found a way to automatically convert a Google Sheet with tracks into a playlist.
Listening to this Spotify playlist, last.fm tells me this is the first time I’ve listened to a track by the following artists:
- Evie Irie
- Wings
- Parquet Courts
- Jon Bryant
- Kings of Leon
- Saves the Day
- Echo & the Bunnymen
- Mick Jagger (crazy, right? I’m not a Mick Jagger fan)
- April Wine
- The Kingston Trio
- Mount Moriah
- Rise Against
- Flogging Molly
- Laura Jane Grace
Wait. What? How can this “last.fm” tell you that this was the first time you listened to a particular artist?
I have a last.fm account that is connected to Spotify. Anyone can do it. It’s really easy. Any song you listen to on Spotify gets tracked on last.fm. Then go to your profile (mine is spudart), and you can see all the tracks you’ve played.
Last.fm also connects to over 400 other music services and websites, like Apple Music, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and YouTube Music.
Via last.fm, you can see how many times you’ve listened to a particular artist. In this case, if an artist has a play count of “1”, then I know that was my first listen to this artist.
Some of these artists on my list might shock people. How could I have never listened to Kings of Leon?
Keep in mind, last.fm does not scrobble tracks when I listen to WESN live. For example, I know I’ve listened to Wings before, because Rockology played them last week on the show. But Wing won’t show up in my last.fm artist list, because I listened to them on WESN live.
However, this time Kings of Leon was tracked for me because they were played on a Spotify playlist. And my Spotify is connected to last.fm.
That brings my unique artists listened to up to 14,524 (since I began scrobbling with last.fm in 2007).
If you haven’t joined last.fm, you should really give it a try. This is only the tip of the iceberg of some of the cool things you can do with your listening history with last.fm. I should write a blog series about it. Like, I’ve said, I’ve been using last.fm since 2007. That’s 19 years of music listening captured. You can start now.
It becomes a fun game to see how many unique artists you listen to.
Oh, and also, if you got this far in the blog post, you might be wondering, “Matt is telling me to listen to college radio, but if I listen to the stream live, it won’t scrobble to last.fm. Isn’t the point to discover new artists?”
Yeah, if you want to have the new artists scrobbled, you’ll need something like Spotify. You can listen to WXAV’s Spotify playlists. Pete has another show, 773 Sounds, that introduces you to local Chicago musicians. Talk about discovering new artists! Pete sometimes posts playlists from the weekly show. Check out WXAV’s Spotify account.
