I thought this was interesting — was organizing my music tonight, and took a look at my “Mike’s Top 200″ playlist in iTunes. I made it a while back — it takes the top 200 songs according to plays and puts them all in one playlist. Unfortunately, as far as I know, iTunes doesn’t register plays from a shared computer (which is actually how I listen to my music most of the time: I have the library saved on my Mac mini, and I use that as a kind of server, listening in via other iTunes installs around my house), but it does register plays on my iPhone and iPod, and that’s probably a good 60% of my listens anyway. So it’s a pretty good list of what I have been listening to. And I decided to sort the songs according to plays, and then list out the top 10 bands. Quite a few bands appear more than once, because I often just put albums on and listen to those all the way through, but I took the first 10 bands that showed up on the list in order. I got this:

1. The Shins
2. The Hush Sound
3. The National
4. Imogen Heap
5. The Mountain Goats
6. Vampire Weekend
7. Fountains of Wayne
8. Arcade Fire
9. Okkervil River
10. Rilo Kiley

Which is pretty darn trendy, if you ask me. It’s interesting, because when people ask me what my favorite music is, I usually tell them The Police, Cake, and Bad Religion — those are definitely the bands whose entire catalogs I enjoy and (at least I thought) that I most listen to. But this list is way different. In fact, while I do see three Cake songs in my top 200, I don’t see any Police or Bad Religion.

Timeframe is another factor — I wore out my old Bad Religion tapes, and I own Cake and The Police’s whole catalogs on CD, so this list is definitely an iTunes product. The earliest song I entered into my library on iTunes is back in September of ‘05, and I probably did do most of my listening of those other bands before then. Strangely, the latest song entered into my top 200 is Metric’s Gimme Sympathy, which I put in my library in April of 2009. And before that, I have to jump all the way back to December 2008 (when I put the Son Lux album in).

Of course, songs have to be in my library a while before I listen to them enough to make this top 200 list (in fact, I wonder what a top 500 list would look like … ). But it’s interesting to me that the actual stats about my listening are so different from what I expected them to be.