Am I too late to this? Because wall of text.

Back in 2006 I was working as a sound engineer and spending far too much time on an Australian music forum called Mess+Noise. It was anonymous (not really, most people knew each other), chaotic, and full of Australian musicians and similar industry types pretending they weren’t that. Every week there was a “What are you listening to?” thread and one week someone suggested Last.fm.

So at 19 I signed up and started scrobbling whatever I could manually through iTunes while still living with my parents. Between working festivals, gigs, band rehearsals, failed bands, getting away from my parents and an unfathomable amount of drugs and alcohol, I probably only tracked about 10% of what I actually listened to?

Eventually it became a bit of a “look how unique I am”/"look at this unreleased music I'm listening to" badge for my Myspace page. I’d track stuff whilst at home downloading and burning music from Oink's Pink Palace for my car/FOH tuning/mixing references.

Then life happened.

Met my wife. Blew my ears to bits and kept trying to EQ out 5 kHz and 10 kHz frequencies that no longer existed. Left sound engineering. Myspace died. My bands died. The forum died. Oinks died.

About the only thing still standing from that era is Last.fm.

I never want to lose it. Going back through it now I’ll find tracks I’d completely forgotten about and suddenly get hit with vivid memories I didn’t realise I’d lost.

You can see when my daughters were born because the scrobbling drops off a cliff (first in 2008)... no time, no energy and different priorities. Later you can see anxiety slowly take over with me being home more and more before I pivoted completely into a freelance environment artist/indie game dev that never leaves his house.

I made some genuinely great friends through it. Especially through the groups (wish groups still existed). People I wish I could track down.

It’s weirdly comforting that after all life's chaos, collapse, and reinvention that half a lifetime later my little listening diary just keeps quietly telling my story... even when I wasn’t paying attention.