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.

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

For a long time now, I have been disappointed with iTunes’ ability to keep track of my listening habits. Currently, iTunes logs playcounts, date added, and last played date for each song in your itunes library, but this kind of information is extremely limited.

For example, last summer I had a set playlist that I listened to at the gym, which forced all of the songs’ playcounts to skyrocket. Now when I look at my most played playlist, they are all pretty high up there, despite the fact that they are in no way my favorite songs. Although there are ways around this, I began searching some something more advanced, and I stumbled upon Last.fm’s Audioscrobbler iTunes plugin.

After installing the plugin (and entering your last.fm login information), all you see is a little music note in your menu bar, but behind the scenes, the plugin is logging all of the songs you play in iTunes to Last.fm, keeping track of not only how much you play a certain song (or artist), but also when. With this kind of information, Last.fm does a number of very interesting things:

1. Creates weekly charts for any given week of the top artists, songs, or albums you listened to that week
2. Tracks your overall top artists, songs, and albums
3. Finds your musical “neighbors”: people that have listened to the music you listen to and have similar tastes
4. Creates two different person radio stations for you, one that will recommend new music based on what you listened to, and one that takes songs from your “neighbors” that you haven’t listened to and plays them for you
5. Lets others see what you are listening to and lets you see what others are listening to (even allows posting your recent track list in your xanga/blog/signature)

The site is pretty amazing, and has helped me find out about what ended up being some of my favorite music. Like all amazing things however, Last.fm is not without its limitations. In order to log the songs you play to Last.fm, you need to be online, which is a significant limitation for those traveling (supposedly offline “scrobbling” should work, but I have yet to see it as of the time of this posting). Also, though logging recently played songs on your ipod is possible, it is very buggy and rarely works (a fix for this is in the works).

Despite its limitations, Last.fm is a website with no parallels, mixing together elements of Pandora, Facebook, MySpace, and iTunes to provide its users with a kind of all encompassing technologically advanced music neighborhood. If you haven’t gotten a free account yet, I highly recommend it. And incidentally, both Mike and I are on it, so look us up!

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.