Each month, Eugene Gordin contributes VolumeSessions, a column about music, digital world, and everything in between.

I have blogged here about Last.fm. I have stated that its an extremely powerful tool. But today, I’m going to make it a bit more powerful.

There is a very short list of things that Last.fm lacks, but its important to realize that there’s room for improvement. Although I’m pretty sure that things like today’s subject will be released officially by the Last.fm, they currently are not, and since joining last June, I haven’t figured out why.

Okay. Enough dancing around it. Last.fm records almost every aspect of our listening habits – how much you listen to individual songs, artists, albums, as well as when you listened to them. This is massive amounts of information, and yet the best visual representation of all of that information is a bar chart?

Maybe as an avid computer user, I demand more than bar charts based on popularity. Maybe as an engineer, I know that more is not only possible, but relatively straightforward to implement. Its high time that we can visually see how we listen to music, how diverse our listening habits are, and how they have changed over time.

Luckily, there are a few Last.fm users who have created their own visual representations of their musical habits. Enough talk. Here’s what I’m talking about: below are three charts, courtesy of Kalu Kalu’s visualization of music listening habits.

Kalu Kalu’s tool also explains the following, in addition to providing the graphs: “In terms of artists, 38% of the music you’ve listened to came from your top 10 artists, 62% came from your top 25 artists, and 81% came from your top 50 artists. Approximately 19% of the music you’ve listened to lies outside of your top 50 artists.”

Pie charts aren’t the only tools provided by the site. The graph below shows how much I listen to my top 50 artists relative to one another.

The site explains: “Your top 13 artists make up about 50% of the 7826 times you’ve listened to your top 50 artists. Recall that your top 50 artists account for 81% of all 9704 songs you’ve listen to.”

This kind of information isn’t available anywhere else. There’s a lot more than these two graphs on the site, so if you’re interested in visualizing your music habits, I highly recommend you check it out.

However, Kalu Kalu’s site isn’t alone. Hans Christoph Hudde provides additional music tools using your information from Last.fm. His additional charts show how the number of artists in your library changed over time, as well as the best positions of artists in your library. Those tools can be found here.

I found both of these tools through the Last.fm Stats group, which wasn’t available when I first had this idea of visualizing music listening habits, but now has connected people who are interested in this subject.

The final thought I leave you with is the future, since this area of music habit visualization is still mostly untapped and new. Music listening trends can be art within themselves, and nothing is more representative of that than Lee Byron’s Music Trend Poster. Its not public yet, though Lee said he’s working opening it soon for public use. Its stunning, beautiful, and most importantly, informational. The future is now.

Eugene Gordin is the author of interesting finds, a blog about computer hardware, software, and technology in general. Views expressed in VolumeSessions are his own. Feedback is welcome at eugene_AT_gordin.net.