Saturday, December 02, 2006

Musical Origins

Left to my own devices, I always seem to put myself onto weird sleep patterns - hence why it is now 3am and I'm not feeling tired.

Anyway, I was laying in bed with the lights off, listening to some relaxing instrumentals by various Icelandic bands when it struck me what a disproportionate amount of Icelandic music I have on my MP3 player. Or at least, what I assumed was a disproportionate amount. So, not being able to sleep, I decided to go through my MP3 player and document where each band was from, and then compare the data. Before we get to that though, a little info about my (extremely simple) methods: I only counted each artist once, regardless of how many or few albums I had by them and I only included artists of whom I have full albums - mixed albums and singles weren't included (not that I have very many of those on there anyways). Also, in cases where the band was from various countries I referred to Wikipedia or just went with where ever they were most prominently based. Finally, I fancy myself to be pretty clever and know a whole lot of things, but it is quite possible that I simply assumed an artist or band to be from some place when in fact they are from another place entirely. Basically what I'm trying to say is that this data isn't very accurate and that I wouldn't draw any serious conclusions from it (plus I switch stuff up on there all the time, so this will be correct for, y'know, the next 12 hours or so). I'm not trying to 'prove' anything about my musical tastes either - in fact you'll see from the results that they are fairly homogenous. Pretty much I was just bored and trying to kill time in order to get to sleep.

Ok, so here are the numbers, in descending order:

American - 45
Canadian - 23
British - 23
Icelandic - 5
Swedish - 2
Australian - 2
Norwegian - 1
Irish - 1
Jamaican - 1


I did think it was kinda neat, however, that if you combine the brits and canadians, you eke the americans out by 1 ;)

You can probably guess the Irish and Jamaican bands, but anyone wanna take a stab at the Norwegian(s)?

3 comments:

Chris said...

Bravo. You win a cookie.

Jim said...

Abba!

Anonymous said...

clearly I didn't poison your mind with the sounds of kiwilandia enough.

(If I find that you've put Crowded House down as Australian, I won't be best pleased).

What if I were to say that Eddie Vedder was a huge fan of Split Enz? A sample might find its way your way soon.