Listening, Ethics, and Class Videos

Hey everyone, just a rambling general update today.

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/week/2

Seems that the second week of the year saw me falling off in my listening habits, but still pretty good. I'm recovering from a cold this week so not a lot going on. 

I am thinking of recycling a lot of my YouTube videos for class this semester as I do have a lot of good ones about debate and argumentation. Is it ethical to make students watch YouTube? There are advertisements there. Is it ethical to make students watch ads for a course they are paying thousands of dollars to attend? 

I would think at best we'd have a good video platform at the university level like Vimeo or something that all students could use. I guess we have Panopto, but most students use the Canvas Studio or they just upload the file to Canvas.

Maybe I'm over thinking it. 


Mysterious Giovanni

Who is Giovanni? 

I was given a CD collection today and there are some amazing things in it but none more amazing than this collection of Giovanni CDs. 

Look at him. Can you have a more disinterested look? He looks like his parents are forcing him to take a photo. 

This collection must be the largest Giovanni album collection in the US right now. These are just a few of them. Why so many?

I also inherited a Bose radio CD player so what better way to test it than a Giovanni CD? There was already one in there when I opened it. It’s just piano music no vocals, which was disappointing. 

Then I started thinking about this from a Stephen King perspective. What if Giovanni is an ancient spirit and playing his whole album allows him to escape his CD prison (like the prison in Superman 2) and then he takes over my body and plays average piano with it? 

That wouldn’t be terrible now that I read it. Maybe even an improvement. But who is he?

Does anyone know or has anyone been to a Giovanni concert? 




The Real Music Stats for 2024

Today's the day where last.fm shows you your annual listening stats in much more detail than Spotify. They also consider December part of the year which Spotify doesn't for some odd reason.

Looks like I can't figure out how to make the replay public, but here's a link to my profile and pretty much everything I have listened to since 2007. You can look at annual track counts, and even down to daily on there if you like.

Some thoughts:

I felt my longest streak would have been 100+ days but I only had 85 concurrent as the longest. 

Last.fm tagged most of the Yellowcard tracks incorrectly, something I missed out on when looking over weekly and monthly reports. These are all meant to be the new joint album with Hammock. Spotify had these correct but somehow last.fm missed it. I wonder what happens if I correct the tags now? Technically it's still correct - it is Yellowcard - but it's not the actual track I listened do which was the remix with Hammock and a very different song. Plus, no credit for Hammock listening!

I really like all the other detailed descriptions of things in the report. I hope you consider getting last.fm and tracking your listening habits too! I've been at it since a student showed it to me in 2007. I have a lot of information about my listening including being able to tell when I heard a track and got obsessed with it to when I last listened to it. It's a lot of fun, as long as you aren't embarrassed by everyone seeing you listened to the same song like 20 times in a row. 

The image of the annual replay should be here in this post! I'll share more when I figure out how to do it. Might just be some screen shots.

Traditional End of the Year Playlist

Here's 2024's list of best new classical music recordings. I make this compilation looking at NPR, Grammophone, the Guardian, and some other places that have a list of the best recordings that came out that year. 

Not my judgement but I do think that these sources really know what they are talking about. Never a bad one in the list. I just look at what they wrote and I go find it on Spotify. 

Here's the Spotify link!