last.fm

[amw]

This is a real nerd site. Basically you sign up and download an application onto your computer which records and catalogues everything you listen to. That's it. At any given time I am either in a period of completely forgetting I have it installed or being slightly obsessed with it.

It automatically generates charts showing what you listen to the most. There are plugins you can use to turn these into neat-looking graphics. I suppose there's also a social aspect, with "friends" and "comments" and such, if you like that sort of thing.

I use it because a lot of my listening activity is random—I dump all my music into iTunes and use iTunes DJ to present a random selection of tracks as background music for, e.g. cleaning the house, writing up applications and blog posts, exercising, et cetera. Thus I'm constantly hearing things I didn't previously know, had forgotten about, or used to like 5 years ago but now think are rather rubbish. >_> Hence the results are (for me) fascinating, if not necessarily representative. I also sometimes listen to music the more normal way with all the movements in order, though not always in a scrobble-able form (last.fm is lamentably bad with YouTube, Spotify and any other service where one doesn't have personal control over the tags).

Check it out, if you haven't heard of it before: http://www.last.fm. (If anyone's really curious, I can be found here.)