One with the bass 🔊

What a year 2021 has been! For the first half of it, I wasn't sure I would ever get to go see live music ever again. Thankfully shows began to happen again and I had my trusty Spotify app with me the entire year.

I really enjoy how at the end of the year Spotify sends you a custom-tailored list of stats about your listening habits. You of course have the option to check out your stats on your own throughout the year by using a tool like this one. However, nobody presents it better than Spotify themselves. The designs are striking, the animations are cool, and they just make it so easy for anyone to share what they've been listening to all year long.

I usually listen to pretty much only EDM (and it's many sub-genres such as dubstep), unless it's some classical music while I write/design, which I'm doing right now (shoutout Chopin). EDM is by far my favorite to listen to at the gym, which is where most of my music gets played. I used to be big into hip-hop, but those frequencies have dwindled, or so I had thought.

I was pretty surprised to be such a huge fan of Kid Ink's new album Alive, which I wrote about extensively here. This album has been on repeat for me for months now. Kid Ink used to be (and I guess still is) my favorite hip-hop artist. He actually inspired me to start getting tattoos back in 2010 which you can read about here. This album alone catapulted Kid Ink to the top of my listening, despite him making hip-hop rather than EDM.

The rest of my listening stats were somewhat predictable, to me at least. An assortment of different EDM artists is on the list, some of which I didn't even realize that I liked as much as I apparently do.

Let's take a closer look at my Spotify 2021 Wrapped...

^{I will be sure to link any specific song I mention on YouTube, so if the words are in blue that means it's a link to listen.}

My intro song was "Lords of the Void" by Midnight Tyrannosaurus and Kadaver. This song hits so hard and is full of that dark sith lord energy. I got lucky enough to see Midnight T live in Baltimore, MD a few years back. I can vouch for the dude and say that his live sets are just as crazy as this song.

Next up was my rival dance crew song, which turned out to be "Confusion Spell" by: Svdden Death. The music video for this one has some pretty dark imagery that goes with the sound of this track. I've seen Svdden Death live twice now. Once nearly 4 years ago and the other time more recently at the big Reunion festival that we went to this past summer. If you haven't already seen my post about that, be sure to do so here.

The last of my movie soundtrack songs were "Bussback" by: Kompany and Wooli. Kompany is one of my favorite EDM artists and is actually the only one I've ever had my photo taken with. I've seen him live 3 times now. Wooli I have gotten to witness perform in person twice. When these two drop a track together, it is always going to go wild. "Thicc Boi" and "Briddim Bomb" are both clear proofs of that. They actually just dropped another track together the other day called "Fight Milk" and it of course goes hard!

28 genres, that seems like a lot. I'm over here thinking that my listening is not varied, but I guess I'm wrong. My audio aura, now that is something interesting to see. Spooky and bold, I do believe that describes me perfectly. Nice job Spotify! As you see, dubstep is my top genre, but wonky and trap sounds also tickle my fancy quite a bit.

9,244 minutes or about 154 hours sounds like a lot of listening to music. I guess it is, but it is a drastic reduction from my Spotify 2020 Wrapped where I had 25,090 minutes or 418 hours of listening.

I wish that I could recall the numbers of my 2019 and prior Spotify Wrapped. I would regularly listen to 6 hours of music at work when I had a job where I could wear headphones all night.

If we do some quick estimation...

50 work weeks and 5 days a week = 260 days of work
6 hours of listening each day = 360 minutes
That is approximately 93,600 minutes of listening through the entire year.

Then add in the music that I listened to outside of work. I'd say the total each year was about 100,000 minutes or 1,666 hours/69 days!

INSANE

There is always so much new music dropping in the EDM scene, it is hard for me to listen to the same thing over and over without losing track of new releases. Even if I really love a song or EP/Album, I typically only listen to it a handful of times.

With Kid Ink's Alive album, the story was different. This was basically the only hip-hop album that I listened to all year long. It was easy for me to come back and listen to it the whole way through quite often. The lyrics got stuck in my head and all of the production was top-notch. This album motivated me to kick ass in 2021.

As you can see, Kid Ink made it to number one for the reasons I just mentioned. Lit Lords make trap music that always goes nuts, I'm addicted to their unpredictable sound. They easily slid into spot number two since they released an abundance of music in 2021. Now that's what I call grinding. My goal is to see Lit Lords live one day.

My top 4 favorite songs off of Kid Ink's album claimed most of my top 5, but that Midnight Tyrannosaurus song "Lords of the Void" that was the opening credits theme on my movie soundtrack (which I also wrote a blog about here), barely made it into my Top 5. "Hoops" took the number one spot. "Rich Talk" in at two. "Night & Day" with a solid placement at three. and "Red Light" at four.

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Listen up 🎧

This post was incredibly fun to craft. Not only did you get to learn more about my listening habits, but so did I. I feel like my taste in music is constantly evolving. Who knows what my Spotify 2022 Wrapped will look like. I know one thing is for certain, you can guarantee that I will be breaking it down here on Hive just like I did with 2021 and 2020.

If you want to listen to more of my favorite songs of the past year, check out My Top 100 Songs of 2021 Playlist on Spotify.