Tracking my media consumption without becoming more of an anxious weirdo
I cancelled my Spotify subscription this year. [Insert dramatic pause while everyone applauds me for my moral courage.]
This is not in itself a very interesting thing. I've started accumulating CDs again, and I'm also piggybacking on a family plan with another arguably-slighty-less evil streaming service for now, although ultimately I'd like to move away from streaming entirely. It's something I've been thinking about for a while for reasons that have already been written about ad nauseam.
What made me want to write a blog post about it, though, is what I realised was making me hesitate. Which was one question: what about my Wrapped?
Wrapped is the annual statistical wrap-up that Spotify gives its users. It tells you what your most-listened-to songs and artists were for the year (or at least for the period between January and an arbitrary cutoff point around Halloween) as well as some other infographics.
There was an easy answer to this (and one some readers were probably already thinking): use Last.fm instead.
The thing is, I was already using Last.fm. And I decided I didn't want to keep using that either.
Me and Last.fm: a personal history
I signed up for Last.fm back in the early 00s, when it was still Audioscrobbler (yes, I am old). At the time, I was mostly listening to MP3s of dubious origin, mostly on the computer but also on my recently acquired iPod. Audioscrobbler seemed like a really new and exciting thing at the time. The idea of getting an automatic statistical breakdown of your own listening habits was novel, and so was the idea of sharing it publicly on the internet.
I continued to use Last.fm fitfully over the next decade or so. Sometimes I'd start a new account, or my laptop would break and I'd forget to set it up on the new one. But what really stopped me from actively using Last.fm was Wrapped. I knew I'd get that little influx of data at the end of the year, and for a while, that was enough for me.
Around the middle of 2025, I set up another new account and started using Last.fm again. This time it was partly because I wanted to see my stats in more detail, but also because I was listening to a lot of new stuff at the time and I often wanted to see what other people thought about it.
Despite knowing that other people in my life were still using Last.fm, I intentionally did not tell them my new username. This is because I know that being observed changes my media consumption. I am a lot less likely to listen to "Informer" by Snow six times in a row if I know that the internet is going to snitch on me. So I figured staying anonymous would keep my listening more "pure".
This did not work.
Juking the stats
As soon as Last.fm started showing me data, my brain started treating it like polling data for Wrapped Day, when my year's collective listening would determine my true favourite artists and favourite songs.
Because every year, without fail, I am surprised by what Wrapped shows me. There are some expected artists, but there's also someone who sneaks in because I had a week or two where I exclusively had them on loop in the background. Or I only get really into an artist near the end of the year and don't have as much time to accumulate plays for their songs, which makes it feel weirdly unfair when they don't make it to the top 5.
My brain's response to this was to try to "fix" the listening data by changing what I was listening to. If I felt someone should be higher in the charts, I'd intentionally listen to them more (or, once, leave them playing while I didn't even have my headphones in). And if I felt someone was too high, I'd go listen to them on YouTube because that wasn't feeding into the data.
Obviously it does not fucking matter what my Wrapped says. Nobody else has to see it, although of course I did always end up sharing it in certain groupchats with friends and family.
But that desire to control it is still there. Partly because of that inevitable insecure desire to be seen to have a "good" Wrapped – eclectic but tasteful – but also to make it feel like it truly represents the experience of my listening, not just the raw data. (Do those desires clash? Absolutely!)
What am I even getting out of this?
Originally, tracking this stuff was just novel and interesting. And there are benefits to automating this stuff. It reminds me of things I enjoyed that might otherwise be abandoned – like a favourite album from earlier in the year that I'd forgotten how much I loved.
Sometimes I also genuinely enjoy sharing my opinions about things, and tracking them offers me a way to do that. For example, I remain an avid user of Letterboxd. I like leaving my little opinions on there, and I like seeing my friends' opinions too.
But Letterboxd still has that quantitative aspect (how many films did I watch this year, and was it more than my friend?) and that image-bolstering aspect (hey, everyone, I watched a Kurosawa film and had an insightful opinion about it!). And there are absolutely times when I can feel the knowledge of the tracking intruding on my experience of actually just watching something. I will sit in the cinema and catch myself thinking about what star rating I'm going to give a film, or a funny joke I could make in the review, and all of that distracts me from the film itself.
Perception affects reality
The place where I've found publicly tracking my media consumption has the biggest impact, however, is on my reading habits.
I read a lot of books and I track them all. I used Goodreads a long time ago, and briefly dabbled with Storygraph, but for the last decade I've done all my book tracking privately. First this was in a custom app I'd built as a project, and then in spreadsheets and notes apps. I logged the title and the author, and if I really liked it, I marked it with a heart.
This system actually worked really well for me. I had all the data I wanted, and while there was still some room for competition (have I read more books than my dad?) it was something I'd only run into when I actually had a conversation about it with someone. And if I ever wanted to talk about my favourite books from the year, I could reference the list and easily spot my favourites... without having to also divulge those two months I'd gone hog wild on Kindle Unlimited.
This year, however, I decided to participate in a reading challenge held in a community where I was already active. The challenge set a bunch of goals to increase my reading variety, and I think chasing those goals has actually been beneficial. But it also required me to publicly log every book I was reading and... you can guess where this is going.
My reading habits changed well beyond the scope of the challenge goals. I pressured myself to log more prestigious and impressive books, and I cut back on reading anything that seemed more low-brow or embarrassing, even when I was tired and really craving something easy and comfortable.
Maybe I did end up more intellectually stimulated, and I did have fun sharing my opinions on some books. But was it more enjoyable? No. I focused less on the pleasure of reading and more on my stupid stats.
What have I learned?
The obvious thing here is that I should have more courage to just love what I love and be less worried about what everyone else thinks.
The even more obvious thing is that's much easier said than done. If you've made it this far into the post, you can already tell that I'm extremely neurotic and overthink everything. (Also – hey, thanks for reading!)
But I think I can see a path forward anyway. In short:
- Consider what's actually worth tracking. Would I rather remember the exact number of times I listened to a song, or the emotional impact it held for me?
- Track things privately by default. It's more honest and it's less stressful.
- Make my own end-of-year wrap-ups. I like the experience of sharing my favourites with other people at the end of the year, but putting it together myself allows for more reflection and less anxiety about "getting it right" all year.
So while I considered listing all the books and movies I've been reading or watching on this site, I'm not going to do that. But I am going to keep making my Best Of lists, to talk about the things I love and want to share.
It's the media itself that matters. If tracking it is getting in the way of that, then it's not worth tracking at all.
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