More Ways to Explore Your Listening History in MusicTrends
I pushed a pretty big update to MusicTrends.net today, adding a bunch of new ways to explore your listening history.
A lot of this release is about looking at your music from two different perspectives: when you listened to something and when that music was released.
Explore your listening year by year
One of the biggest additions is a new set of Listen Year pages.
You can now pick a year and get a summary of what you were actually listening to during that period. That makes it much easier to go back to a particular point in time and see the artists, albums, tracks, and other trends that defined your listening that year.
Alongside those, I've added Release Year and Release Decade pages.
These flip the question around. Instead of asking when did I listen to this?, you can explore your listening based on when the music itself was released.
Want to see how much of your listening comes from the '70s? The '90s? The 2020s? That's now much easier to explore.
And you can combine them
This is where things get a little more interesting.
Listen Year and Release Year can be combined, letting you ask questions like:
What music released in 2025 did I actually listen to in 2025?
That particular capability came from a suggestion by another MusicTrends user, which is exactly the kind of feedback I'm hoping to get as more people use the site.
Here's an example showing music released in 2025 and listened to during 2025:
Explore 2025 releases listened to in 2025
More ways to visualize your listening
I've also added new charts to many of the summary pages.
You can now see how listening breaks down by Listen Year, making it easier to spot which periods account for the most listening and how that changes across your history.
There are also new Release Year and Release Decade charts, so you can quickly see whether your listening leans toward newer releases, particular decades, or a mix of everything.
These are exactly the kinds of views I originally wanted when I started building MusicTrends: not just another list of top artists and tracks, but different ways to slice the same listening history and see what stands out.
Albums get some more attention
Albums are getting some love in this release, too. 💿
The overall summary, yearly summaries, and monthly summaries now include a Top Albums display.
I've always wanted MusicTrends to look beyond individual tracks. Sometimes an album becomes the soundtrack for a particular month or year, and now those patterns are much easier to see.
And a bunch of smaller improvements
There are quite a few other changes packed into this release as well:
- More detailed Artist and Album pages
- Improved search
- Song duration tracking
- Improved album and artwork sources
Some of those are things you'll notice immediately, while others are laying groundwork for more analysis I want to add down the road.
Still more to come
One of the things I've enjoyed most about building MusicTrends is that every new way of looking at the data seems to lead to another question I want to answer.
And now that other people are using it, some of those questions are coming from them, too.
That's exactly what I hoped would happen when I opened the project up.
There are plenty more ideas on my list, but for now, all of today's updates are live at:
If you've been tracking your listening through Last.fm or ListenBrainz, give it a try. And if looking through your own history makes you think of something else MusicTrends should help you discover, I'd love to hear about it.
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