Today my iTunes library surpassed 1,800 tracks, and as I travelled from Wakefield to Camberley (at a steady 69.4 mph of course) listening to a variety of music I wondered to myself “what would my musical taste look like as a wordle?”.
This took five minutes of configuration – export the iTunes library, manipulate the text file to take out the word ‘the’ and take out any spaces in the band names (this was necessary, otherwise ‘Smashing’ and ‘Pumpkins’ would be treated as separate entries). Copy, and paste into wordle. Play around with the fonts and layout a bit… and there you have it. I actually have fifty-two bands or artists represented in my iTunes library, but I set the maximum words to fifteen so that it wasn’t too crowded and full of words that were too small to read.
Before you mention it… yes, I like a-Ha. No shame in that. They’ve moved on to a more mature sound since their 80’s pop days. No surprise about the biggest names there, and there is no truth in the rumour that Westlife were #sixteen in popularity.
Hmmm…interesting use of wordle. Thanks for sharing the “how to,” I think that I’ll have to do this, too. 🙂
Interesting to see ELO in with all those hard rockers!
This raises an interesting question about people’s iTunes libraries. From your wordle, it would seem that the Smashing Pumpkins are bigger than the Beatles. Is it that you have more Pumpkins stuff on your library and you have everything that both bands have ever done or are you selective and only keep the tracks that you listen to on a regular basis.
Personally, it would seem that I am just a music whore as I just import albums whether I like all the tracks or not. 😉
That may explain why I have 3529 tracks in my library and probably never listen to three quarters of them.
Maybe you try the same exercise by popularity listing and see what happens.
@2 – I wouldn’t describe the Flaming Lips, Tears for Fears, XTC or Radiohead as hard rockers.
@3 – the simple fact is that I have just about everything the Pumpkins ever created and that’s 161 tracks. I don’t have everything from the Beatles (not the early albums, I have Rubber Soul onwards) and that’s 142 tracks. XTC accounts for 147 tracks and the Manic Street Cleaners with 116, followed by Incubus (84) and the Foo Fighters (83).
I do have some stuff I’ve not listened to in a long time… I don’t know why I still have two Coldplay albums as they bore me to tears, and Radiohead lost their way and I really can’t listen to them any more.
The size of the font is of course related to the number of tracks, not how much I listen to the artist / band… otherwise Incubus, We Are Scientists and Supergrass would dwarf everything else.
And, of course, Steps were never that prolific 😉 so they didn’t make it onto the wordle.
Good job you don’t have a full collection of Bill Nelson material, the font would be two feet high!