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a construction engineer holding and reviewing blueprints

December 7, 2025 / 0 Comments

How I Made My 2025 Music Recap

I spent most of my free time over the last week turning twelve months of Last.fm scrobbles into something resembling what I might get from the digital music streaming platforms. The goal was to achieve narrative clarity about how my listening habits are shaped by genre, vibe, purpose, and pattern.

Two things became obvious fast:

The raw data is messy. Pulling a year of listening into a meaningful shape requires way more cleaning, classification, and context than I had done since switching from Spotify to Tidal. I’m not Every Noise at Once.
The story isn’t in the numbers alone. Meaning can’t be easily derived from play counts alone.

I wanted to be a more intentional listener this year, leaving Spotify’s algorithmic overreach for a more human, artist-centric product experience in Tidal. I achieved that. Now, if I feel like I’m in a rut, I can’t really blame the technology. I have to work my way out of it. Building more playlists helps with that, as does trying out more of the user playlists that the platform’s home page surfaces to me.

The Sources

Three inputs shaped the foundation:

Last.fm scrobble history for every play, including timestamps and track-level breadcrumbs.
My own tags and taxonomies:
This year, I built an artist descriptor system to replace Last.fm’s chaotic tag soup. I capped it at three genres and two descriptors per artist. For songs, I added a mood and a mode. I’m sure both dictionaries will expand in 2026.
Context logs:
I tracked my weekly and monthly top performers, which made it easier to tie shifts in listening to what was happening in my own life.

The Tools

A Last.fm data exporter. The one I used always pulls your full history (though you can download partial fills during the process). I’ve found another that allows you to draw an update based on a timestamp. I’ll be using it going forward unless I come across something better.
Google Sheets for merging, normalizing, and verifying counts.
A personal KPI tracker to keep genre weights, album totals, and monthly shifts consistent.
ChatGPT as an analyst assistant, primarily for structuring and processing data logs, similar to how I use AI to assist me at work, where I also have limited resources. It helped me think through how I wanted to set up a data analysis framework, and then I implemented it in tools outside the LLM that aren’t prone to hallucination, bad math, or fantasy. One area I intend to explore early in the new year is AI solutions explicitly designed for data analysis and exploration. I’ve gotten to play around with these kinds of tools in some enterprise products and marketing analytics tools, which I’ve found exciting and delightful, but as I have noted throughout this year, making this stuff work requires a ton of thoughtful setup under the hood.

The Structure

45 Descriptors (like 1980s or Underground or The South)

19 Genres (like Hip-Hop, Funk, or K-Pop)

12 Moods (like Cinematic, Energetic, or Spiritual)

12 Modes (like New Day Vibes, Working Out, or Still Processing)

I enjoy the classification process despite (or perhaps because) how challenging and time-consuming it is. I learned during my Paramount+ days that building a single, consistent metadata system is hard, and few want to own it.

I get it. It’s daunting to take on this task even if you’re the lone customer, but c’est la vie.

The Playlists

I do a lot more playlist management on Tidal than I ever did on Spotify, and this process has encouraged me to create more playlists.

Colorful gradient background featuring the text 'NEW DAY Vibes' curated by Jason Toney

Cover art for a music playlist titled 'THE COOL DOWN', featuring a cosmic-themed illustration of a purple planet surrounded by stars, with the subtitle 'music for heavy eyelids' and curated by Jason Toney.

You can find all my publicly available playlists on my profile.

The Stats

42.6k streams
17.3k tracks
9.8k albums
5.2k artists
~53% of my spins this year were categorized.

Top Artists

Top Albums

A grid of album covers showcasing popular tracks including 'GNX' by Kendrick Lamar and 'Let God Sort Em Out' by Clipse, along with their respective play counts.

The 2025 Mixtape

Improvements for 2026

On Saturday morning, I spun up a BigQuery project connected to a Google Colab notebook so I can process my Last.fm data at scale. Each month, I’ll ingest new scrobbles, update artist and song classifications, and sync them all to my active playlists.

The goal is 80% classification over the next 12 months. I want a much more comprehensive understanding of my listening patterns, defined on my terms.

The one data point I’m still missing: song length. The public metadata ecosystem is thin, and time-listened has become the backbone metric of every streaming recap. Getting accurate, open song-duration data may be an uphill battle.

Is it weird that I have been having a lot of fun nerding out on this little data project?

A young man on a busy city street with headphones on and a backpack. Only the back of his head is visible but he appears to be enjoying what he is listening to.

February 8, 2025 / 1 Comment

Escaping Spotify: My Month of Intentional Listening with TIDAL

On the day Spotify announced its first fiscal year of profitability, I canceled my paid subscription. My action was not in response to that news but in recognition that after a month of using TIDAL as my primary music streaming service, I didn’t miss the world’s most popular audio app enough to continue paying for it.

I switched to TIDAL at the beginning of 2025. I’m trying to live a more intentional digital life, and the question of the most ethical way to listen to music online led me to the service. It has been a fantastic replacement for the things on Spotify I had become too dependent on and less enamored with over time.

The music on TIDAL sounds great! I can hear the difference in audio quality, especially when using my high-quality speakers and headphones. TIDAL has fewer algorithmic bells and whistles than Spotify. However, the service still values human curation by music aficionados. It is obsessed with the people who make music rather than celebrities or hyper-personalization. Those subtle shifts mean I am not overwhelmed by their homepage when I select my next listen. TIDAL forces me to be a more active music selector, which has led to an increase in complete album spins and artist-centric radio stations. It has also led to me listening to more music overall.

Spotify Wrapped and Last FM’s Yearly Listening Reports tell me I am a high-volume digital music listener annually. I’m generally amongst the top 5% of all users on those services in spins. I listen to about 80 songs a day every day. My consistency is a crazy outlier.

In January, I pressed play 3900 times from over 960 different artists across nearly 1400 different albums and over 2400 unique songs. From what I saw in other people’s music listening wrap-ups for 2024, that might eclipse their digital streaming totals for the year. I’m a terrible customer of an audio streaming service. All that streaming means they likely are paying out all my monthly subscription payments in royalty distribution. I’m the kind of power user that subscription services have to mitigate in some way if their costs are variable by consumption, and I’m sure they do. Based on what I know about the digital subscription business, there’s a significant portion of dormant or extremely low-consumption users whose subscription fees have little to no royalty implications most months.

One of the reasons I switched to TIDAL was to get music artists and publishing rights owners the highest royalty payment I could. My spins in January could account for about $50 in royalty payouts or five times the value of a monthly TIDAL subscription. By comparison, those same listens on Spotify would equal $12, or about the total cost of their monthly premium tier. That’s what I intended to do!

My top five artists of the month should all earn at least a dollar from my listening, with Kendrick Lamar nearly making $2. On Spotify, that would be about 45 cents. Over time, I will likely generate the cost-equivalent royalties for my most loved albums as a digital or physical media purchase.

This is the way.

There are other benefits to this switch. My New Arrivals playlist isn’t overrun with bedroom producers (or fake artists) gaming the algorithm like Release Radar had become on Spotify. Social sharing from TIDAL is service-agnostic. I’ve returned to Pocketcasts as my podcast-listening solution—a service for which I have a lifetime, no-cost membership. I had already given up on Spotify’s audiobook offering, having found the limitation of listening by time rather than by the number of titles nonsensical.

I do miss some of the more serendipitous discovery features that Spotify offers. And I’m spending much more time updating metadata on Last.fm. I’m not sure this is a negative, though. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I enjoy data cleanup. It also is a better time suck than doomscrolling.

TIDAL’s lack of intelligent app switching is annoying. Not being able to have my current listening jump from device to device was a bit of magic on Spotify. So was Smart Shuffle.

But I can feel confident that the creators are getting their rightful share in exchange for these missing features. At the same time, I listen to their work at the highest quality available and support music curators who have taste. It’s a more than fair trade-off.

January 6, 2025 / 1 Comment

Switch

What’s the most ethical way to listen to digital music?

By ethical, which major services pay the fairest royalty to artists and music rights owners on a per-play basis? Spotify has been the most prominent digital music provider for years, and they have used that position to pay less than their competitors. They also are increasingly doing what tech companies tend to do when they begin to dominate the industry they are disrupting: find ever more creative ways not to pay people.

The collective disappointment with this year’s Wrapped—including me—has sparked a drumbeat of social media users reminding us that there are services that treat artists better than Spotify and provide more value for their customers if higher audio quality is your thing. TIDAL, Apple Music, and Amazon Music can all make this claim.

An infographic explaining streaming royalty rates, including a bar chart that shows that Tidal pays out the best while Deezer pays the worst, and several factoids about the state of music industry revenue

credit: ProducerHive

I have requirements beyond the baseline of a good digital music service—catalog size, playlist diversity, personalization, and audio quality. The most important of which is relatively niche: integration with Last FM. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I’m a bit obsessive about capturing my listening data, and this year’s Spotify Wrapped hammered home the need to continue to have a solution independent of the digital streamers.

That requirement severely limits my options as few services natively integrate with last.fm anymore. I could make it work if I only listened to music via iTunes or a web browser. Still, I regularly switch between my laptop, my phone, and my tablet, and so, despite having access to all of the major services in some form via bundles I pay for, they won’t work for me in this case. [ed. Note—we’ll need to examine the value of these bundles in the future.]

It’s frustrating that this is the case, but I don’t mind shifting to TIDAL. I’ve used the service before. They pay the best per stream of all the major digital music providers. They have the highest quality audio. It should be a no-brainer, but I have used Spotify so much over the decade since the death of rdio that I have gotten used to the things they provide.

A Pay table with three columns—Streaming Platform, Royalty Rates (per stream), and Streams Required to make $1. It only requires 78 streams to make $1 from Tidal Music while it takes 314 to achieve the same on Spotify.

credit: ProducerHive

But I’m listening right now, and the music sounds excellent. The transition felt daunting initially, but playlist transfer was easy thanks to TuneMyMusic (though why they require a subscription is bewildering. This is a once-in-a-blue-moon use case. Charge me once or on a per-usage basis). Within a couple of hours, I started to find my way. TIDAL has human-curated playlists like New West Coast, Women of Hip-Hop, New Arrivals: Hip-Hop and R&B, Grown Rap, Real Love: Best New R&B, R&B Hits, and Pop&B that are fair proxies for the mostly ML-based recommendation playlists that I used on Spotify. As I listen to more music, the home page is refining and showing relevant playlists, artists, songs, and albums I will likely explore.

My Tidal home feed has sections for Suggested new albums, recently updated curated playlists, user playlists I might like, and albums it thinks I might want to revisit.

After using TIDAL exclusively this weekend, personalized music mixes appeared on my home page feed this morning.

My Tidal home feed has sections for custom mixes, my favorite artists, recommended new music, and curated Essentials playlists from artists I might want to get to know better.

There were some mishaps. I lost some song scrobbles because I didn’t check if I had to sign in to Last.fm on every device where I am using TIDAL (I do). Track-level data cleanup will be an ongoing concern, but I learned that I can correct metadata mistakes from TIDAL’s scrobbles to Last.fm by editing a track at the scrobble level. The cool thing is that when I correct that data, Last.fm allows me to correct previous scrobbles and set it so future appearances of that track will be automatically updated to the proper naming conventions. What a revelation! For example, I was able to go back and update scrobbles from when Kendrick Lamar’s GNX first dropped—before the featured artists were included in the track name—and fix those so I have an accurate count of how many times I have listened to dodger blue (feat. wallie the sensei, siete7x, roddy ricch) and peekaboo (feat. AzChike).

Fewer algorithmic playlists mean more active and intentional listening, and intention is IN for 2025. I’m tired of being tricked by convenience into being passive in so many things in my life. I want my brain to make more choices about things that matter to me, like what I’m listening to and why. I want my values to be the driving factor in where and how I spend money and time.

If you’re on TIDAL, you can find me here.

Where do you listen?

Banner Photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash