Listening habits

A quick look at the 2026's first six months

I wasn’t going to post tonight, but Eric (who I recently started following) posted his top 10 most listened to songs tonight in a note as collated by one of my favorite sites, last.fm. In so doing, I was inspired to post mine as well. I’ve seen a lot of retrospectives of the first six months of the year, and while I am very fond of doing year-end reviews, I don’t think I’ve ever done a mid-point roundup. So here it goes.

First of all, the song list.

Not surprisingly, the top two spots are tracks from my most eagerly awaited album of 2026, Madonna’s Confessions II, which I have written a lot about and will probably continue to write a lot about. For those wondering where “Love Sensation” is, it’s just outside the top 10, beings it was released the most recently and was also, to be honest, my least favorite of the three pre-release tracks we got. But then it was also my most played track for June so go figure I guess. I expect something from that album to be at the top of my most-listened to songs at the end of the year, although I thought that would be the case in 2019 when Madame X was released, but that year, the top spot went to Celine Dion’s “Flying On My Own.”

There’s two Amy Grant songs which is a little off my beaten path, but she and I have a long history that goes back to 1986, but that’s a story for another day. Also making the top 10 are a pair of Jessie Ware songs, the Mary Chapin Carpenter/Mountain Goats due that I wrote about here. There’s others but I’ll let them speak for themselves.

As I said, I adore last.fm because, as a Spotify and Apple Music user, it helps to collate my total music listening in one convenient spot. It is the one site I don’t mind them mining my data. I’ve been a user since 2004, back when they were Audioscrobbler, and I’ve seen more iterations of the site than I ever thought possible. I very gladly cough up $4.99 each month to keep ads away and to support a service that I use pretty much daily.

If you want to follow me there, you can find me at this link.

And for those curious, here’s my overall most played top 10.