Imagine a picture showing every piece of music you’ve listened to for the last year…

 

Love this idea in a big way: data visualisation of music you have been listening. Lee Byron at Megamu took the data from his Last.fm account and created a series of beautiful images that show what he was listening to. As Infosthetics explains:

each colored band represents a musical artist, progressing left to right. the span is wider when listening was more frequent, & skinnier when it was not. the hue of the artist represents the time of the first listen for the particular user: cooler colors represent artists who have been listened to for a long period of time while warmer colors represent artists who are more recent in the user’s listening habits.

It looks incredible and in a way it is a very personal portrait of what music a person was choosing to listen to at certain times in their life. As Lee says:

While this is interesting to look at, it is more significant on a personal level. When viewing your own music listening history you are reminded of past events that caused the trends to emerge.

It would be brilliant if Last.fm offered this as a service to users, wouldn’t it?

 

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