I’m not sure Last.fm accurately captures my listening history, but this is what it says I listened to. This doesn’t count records and CDs I listened to at home, of course. This list is the top track of my top 10 artists of 2021. I’m surprised by a few of my top artists. I think the explanation is that I listened pretty heavily to a handful of artists, and the rest had very few plays, but enough to get them into the top 10....

Tidal created a playlist of my 2021 for me. I went on a few different kicks where at different times I immersed myself in Arthur Blythe, Don Pullen, Kahil El’Zabar, David Murray, along with some Latin (mostly classics by Eddie Palmieri, Mario Bauzá) and some old blues (a lot of John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, and T-Bone Walker). I’m surprised Archie Shepp didn’t make it into the playlist because I obsessed on him for a minute....

My web hosting provider gives me access to some old-school tools, like AWStats, for seeing activity on the site, but I was looking for something different. The free analytics tools are of course a privacy nightmare, so I knew I wouldn’t use them. The more privacy-friendly options tend to require self-hosting or paying a rather high monthly fee for something that’s really just a hobby. Enter GoatCounter. The developer has the right idea about counting visits and page views rather than trying to do some deep analysis on visitor behavior....

I don’t always pay attention to the recommendations and playlists on Tidal because they are so hip-hop focused and I’m not into that. Today, though, I noticed that there were playlists of my top listens for recent months and the entire year 2020. Nice! I’m happy about this because it’s cool but also because my connection to last.fm appears to have broken at some point, and a lot of my listens were probably lost....

It annoys me to no end when sites insist on connecting to Google analytics or Facebook. I realized that the widgets from Odesli that let you link to a song on various streaming services was using Google analytics and Facebook events. I stripped those out of my posts and changed over to Songwhip, which seems to do the same thing but without trying to talk to Google or Facebook (but also without the widget)....