My two most-scrobbled albums on Last.fm are separated by one play. Skeletal Lamping has 417; Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? has 416. Both are by of Montreal. After all this time, apparently there is still an internal election.
That is the useful surprise in looking through my public listening history. The singles chart has Käärijä, Lorde, Britney Spears and Kim Petras. The albums still have a substantial indie-rock foundation. The collection has acquired more entrances without demolishing the original building.
This account goes back to high school. Last.fm gives the joining date as October 23, 2005, and the profile showed 66,955 scrobbles across 5,589 artists when checked on October 26, 2026.
the 2006 evidence is still there
The oldest accessible page of loved tracks supplies something more specific than nostalgia by release date. In September 2006, the marked favorites include Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth,” the New Pornographers’ “Twin Cinema,” and the Decemberists’ “Bandit Queen.” Weird Al’s “White & Nerdy” is there too. The filing system was never especially strict.
October adds of Montreal’s “Happy Yellow Bumblebee,” Jump, Little Children’s “B-13,” and Ben Folds’ “Zak and Sara.” By November, the Mountain Goats’ “This Year” and Silversun Pickups’ “Lazy Eye” appear. They establish an actual early trail: distinctive voices, busy songs, and room for a joke.
The middle of the archive makes the overlap clearer. By 2012–13, the loved tracks include The Book of Mormon’s “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” Scissor Sisters’ “It Can’t Come Quickly Enough,” and Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” featuring Charli XCX. Jump, Little Children and of Montreal appear in that same stretch. The pop and theatre were already sharing the room with the bands.
the albums stayed; the singles got louder
Across the account’s recorded history, of Montreal leads the artist chart with 2,124 scrobbles. Lady Gaga follows with 1,285, then Jump, Little Children with 1,207, RuPaul with 1,039, and Charli xcx with 904. That top five is a fairly efficient rebuttal to the idea that a listening history needs one genre.
Below the nearly tied of Montreal albums sits Jump, Little Children’s Magazine, followed by Gaga’s Chromatica and Alaska Thunderfuck’s Anus. Album totals count individual track scrobbles, so they are not counts of complete album listens. Even with that limitation, the company is revealing. The art-pop, the band records, and the very large pop gestures have all accumulated substantial repeat business.
The lifetime track chart puts “Cha Cha Cha” first at 98 recorded plays, with “Royals” at 96. “Work,” “Die Young,” “My Queer Teenage Anthem,” and “There Will Be Blood” follow. Then Rilo Kiley’s “With Arms Outstretched” turns up in the top ten, keeping a seat for the guitars. This is a persuasive argument for a playlist with very few quiet transitions.
the newer window has its own cast
The past-365-days artist chart, checked on the same date, is led by Charli xcx, followed by Ke$ha and Kim Petras tied, then Nemo and Robyn. That is a different emphasis from the lifetime totals. It does not establish a clean break with the older music: the current loved-tracks pages still put of Montreal, the Postal Service and Rilo Kiley alongside Gaga and RuPaul.
The interesting pattern is accumulation. The early indie favorites remain visible while dance-pop and theatrical singles gain more space.
all-time, no snooze
The accompanying all-time bangers playlist turns that combination into something playable: a selection informed by the history, rather than a mechanical countdown of the highest totals. The brief is a commute with some momentum. The scrobbles can handle the paperwork.
Open “all-time, no snooze” in Spotify: 50 tracks, about 2 hours 44 minutes. Seven selections are editorial picks from heavily scrobbled albums; the rest have direct track-level evidence in the public history.
Last.fm isn’t the whole story, but twenty-one years of scrobbles still leave a pretty good paper trail.
Photo credits: featured, Käärijä at the Eurovision 2023 final rehearsal by Michael Doherty, CC BY-SA 4.0. Body: Kevin Barnes in Gothenburg, 2005 by Jonas Riise Hamre, public domain; Lady Gaga at The Chromatica Ball, 2022 by Sjoerd van der Schaaf, CC BY 2.0. Resized for display; no other changes. Concert photographs illustrate the artists, not events attended by the author.