Phil's Superpower of Enthusiasm

• Roon, the primary listening system in my house, which allows me to centrally direct music to a dozen endpoints around my house. Roon provides pretty detailed statistics about your listening habits, but only for either 1) a defined period starting on they day you’re looking and go back no more than the last year, or 2) as long as the server has been running.
• Tidal is the primary streaming service I use to feed Roon, and I occasionally use Tidal directly to listen to music on an iOS device or occasionally my work PC. Tidal’s data is reasonably accessible, but because I’m primarily playing Tidal via Roon, the datasets really overlap.
• Apple Music, which I use for virtually all my listening when I’m anywhere other than my house, either on an iPhone, iPad, or on my personal laptop. Oh, and I use it to listen to music in my living room via an Apple TV, or via any of the HomePods in my house because Siri sometimes makes it easier than pulling out my phone and using Roon if I only have a few minutes and I’m in a room other than my office.
• Last.fm, which theoretically “scrobbles” everything that’s played through Tidal or Apple Music.

Unfortunately, it’s a manual process to combine and compare the data across the systems. Fortunately, I’m a huge music nerd and I think this is a fun way to spend an afternoon off. So here we go!

[Caveats: for this analysis I drew only from my Roon server and Apple Music’s internal statistics. It doesn’t include the listening I did directly from Tidal (pretty minimal at this point, and really difficult to separate Tidal plays captured by Roon from those that aren’t), or any non-streaming listening like listening to vinyl, CDs, tapes, etc. So it’s pretty close, but won’t include quite everything. I’ve combined the data below. Totally possible I fat-fingered something in there, but the numbers seem pretty consistent.]

First, some overall numbers:

Overall 2023 Listening

I’m surprised by how consistent I am across the years; it’s a little less than a 1% variation year-to-year; about twelve hours different from the high to the low, at least in terms of streaming. I feel like I listened to a lot less vinyl in 2023, but there’s no good way to track that without a lot of manual work.

This means that I was listening to streamed music about 15% of the time in 2023, or almost 22% of my waking hours (assuming 8 hours of sleep a night). I’m okay with that, and it sounds about right.

The Meat

Now for the fun stuff!

Top songs of 2023:

Interesting to me how different these are; I think it goes to the difference in uses between the systems? Apple Music is usually something I use while transitioning between places and tasks and often is me telling Siri to play something that pops into my brain at the moment. Four of the Apple picks are tracks that featured prominently on TikTok in 2022 and 2023, and six of them were on my top 2022 Apple Music Replay playlist (which I played waaaay too often in 2023). “Dirty Sexy Money” by David Guetta is a WEIRD in the my Roon stats, with more than 11 times as many plays as anything else. It almost has to have been accidentally played on repeat on one of my Roon endpoints where the amplifier was off. It also pops up a lot on Roon radio after a queue is finished, but that can’t account for more than 1,100 plays. The rest of these make sense; “Freefall” was the most recently added track in Apple Music for me for months, and that tends to be a list I play when I have a few minutes but don’t want to pick a track so I can see why it popped up so much. Those tracks are also all on a stretching playlist that I listen to for fifteen or twenty minute at least twice a week while I’m stretching or foam rolling.

The Roon list is more interesting; they’re a mix of things that I deliberately pick in the moment or things that Roon comes back to a lot on shuffle. They’re all good songs and I get why they’re there; “Thank You” in particular is one I tend to throw on when I’m doing something in my bedroom like changing sheets or sorting laundry.

Top Artists of 2023:

Sun Glitters is a weird one here, and almost has to be another one that was playing on a repeat queue on an endpoint that was powered down. (Victor Ferreira is great and I definitely listened to his work a lot, but I don’t think 20 hours worth in 2023). Everything else makes sense; I wasn’t surprised to see The National, Robert Glasper, and All Tvvins pop up on both as I tend to listen to them both at home and out in the world (especially The National, who released two good full-length albums in 2023 and was overall my most played artist with more than 1,400 minutes played). I think I probably need to figure out if some of the albums that aren’t on both lists aren’t on both because I haven’t added them to both libraries (and I’ve been bad this year about the five step process required to sync libraries between the two systems).

Top Albums of 2023:

Nothing here is super surprising either; I’m not sure I’d have expected that I listened to “First Two Pages of Frankenstein” 85 times on Apple alone, so I’m pretty sure that Apple Music is counting each time you play one or more songs from the album as a play of the album. Honestly I’d have expected “Midnights” to be higher on the list, but I have two different versions of the album (as well as a couple copies on vinyl) so I’m guessing that it’s just that at some point I transitioned from the original to this version and Apple doesn’t combine the two. “The 1975” is only a little bit surprising because I expected it to pop up more on the Apple side of the house, given how often I throw it on a HomePod or Echo when I’m working on something (that’s why “Seeds” made this list, five years after it was released; it’s a good one to ask a digital assistant to play off the top of my head). Three or four of the Roon picks are things that I throw on in the background when I’m showering or shaving or cleaning my kitchen too, so they make sense.

I do wish that Roon tracked number of plays instead of minutes played; I’d love to do a side-by-side without having to figure out track length and do the math.

Top Genres of 2023

Genres are pretty arbitrary in general, and I really don’t expect much consistency within a service, let alone across it, but I’m not particularly surprised that both suggest that I favor alternative, electronic, rock, and pop. I’m surprised rap doesn’t show up on Apple given how much I thought I listened to rap over the course of the year, but it probably just means that I did more of that listening at home (thanks to the newly-streaming De La Soul catalog and a deep dive back into A Tribe Called Quest’s older albums).

Listening Across Services over 3 Years

This was a real surprise to me; while my overall listening has been pretty consistent across the last three years, there’s been a pretty substantial shift away from Roon and toward Apple Music. My use of Apple Music has increased almost 400% and Roon decreased nearly 30%:

Why the Shift Between Services? aka The Super Nerdy Stuff

There are a couple of plausible explanations for this shift:

1. In 2021, I was working remotely from home four and a half days a week, with only a half day a week in my office. For the last half of 2022 and basically all of 2023, I was working more or less two days a week in Seattle and from my home office only three days a week. This means less opportunity to listen to Roon, and more incentive to listen to Apple Music while in the office.
2. Midway through 2021, Apple introduced lossless streaming and Spatial Audio for free to all Apple Music subscribers. This meant that I felt less obliged to use Tidal directly while I was out and about, because I could listen to CD-quality playback from Apple Music. Apple music is the native player for most of my out-and-about devices (iPhones, iPad, Apple laptop) so it’s more convenient, and when that convenience stopped being at the cost of sound quality …
3. For whatever reason, Apple Music seems to play nicer with Carplay in my Kia, so sometime in 2022 I switched over from mostly streaming via Tidal on car trips to streaming via Apple Music. It’s not a huge amount of listening time, but when you figure I’m spending three hours a week minimum driving to and from Seattle, it starts to add up.
4. Apple Music plays really nicely with Apple-branded or -owned headphones (Airpods, plus Beats products). In October of 2022 I was introduced to the Apple Airpods Pro2, which it turns out I really really love, despite myself. And then in November, I got a pair of the AirPods Max which I also really, really love, despite myself. Both also implement Apple’s spatial audio protocol really well, and sound good even with the limitations of Bluetooth. Because I really liked both pairs and their ANC transparency modes are so good in an office environment, I started mostly using them in the office and stopped using my Dragonfly Red frankendongleDAC or my desktop amp and wired headphones when I was in the office. While I could use the Airpods with Tidal … why bother when Apple Music is right there and tightly integrated?

Really it’s almost certainly a combination of all of these factors. It adds an interesting challenge for Tidal’s business model. Tidal seems to be pretty focused on the audiophile market rather than general consumers, and they’ve lured a bunch of us into their ecosystem by offering “high resolution” sound and compatibility with Roon, BluOS, and a variety of high-end audiophile gear. Apple took the knees out of that first advantage when they made lossless available to everyone for free, and if they ever decide to open up their API to anyone other than legacy systems like Sonos, I think Tidal’s business model is in even more jeopardy that it already is.