by Linda Holmes

If you like good music, good chatter, or vigorous nerd fights, you will surely enjoy the All Songs Considered show featuring NPR Music's 2008 Year In Review. It's a funny, lively discussion that will remind you of some of the best music of the year.

But how many people listen to that stuff? Last.fm, as it happens, has released its "Best Of 2008" lists, which aren't so much "best of" lists as "most listened to" lists. The way Last.fm works, its software (if you choose) can make a note of what you listen to on your computer, in order to improve its understanding of what you like. They can also use the data to come up with these aggregations of what artists, tracks, and albums people actually listened to the most in 2008. Not what they said they listened to, but what they actually listened to.

So how did Last.fm users line up with NPR Music? You can look for yourself, and you'll see that among Last.fm's top ten artists are Santogold, Fleet Foxes, MGMT, and -- yes -- Bon Iver, The Official Bearded Mountain Band Of NPR Music, all of whom got mentions in the piece. Bon Iver is also featured in the clip above, performing "Dance, Dance, Dance" with Lykke Li.

Among the top albums, in addition to those from the artists already mentioned, are the records from Coldplay and Death Cab For Cutie, which were sort of the NPR Music flag-wavers for more heavily played music that was still good.

All in all, not a bad alignment between what was good and what was popular, although Bob Boilen will have to wait a little longer for the inevitable resurgence of Sparks.

categories: Music

9:43 - December 9, 2008

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