I have been scrobbling since 2005. I have never used Last.fm to discover new music or exploited its social network features. Instead, I use Last.fm to log the music tracks I play. It is an unobtrusive process, for the most part. And ever since I stopped using iTunes entirely and switched to Spotify, the activity of tracking my music has become completely seamless and invisible. While my music tastes have changed over the past eleven years, one thing that struck me from analysing the data provided by Last.fm is that there was a sudden and dramatic drop in the number of music tracks I played after 2010.
While the number of music tracks has risen, the increase is nowhere near to the levels prior to 2011. I returned to the US in December 2010, was such a shift that disruptive to my music listening habits?