I remember this reading this thread at the time, but back then I felt I didn't have enough music in my collection for this to be a worthwhile exercise. My collection has expanded greatly, from about 400 songs when I joined the board to just under 1100 now. Still fairly small compared to some of you I'm sure, but a definite improvement!
Unfortunately my iPod only has a capacity of 16 GB so I may have to make some tough decisions in the future as to which songs go onto it, still have a bit room left for now though.
This is my top ten artists in terms of the number of individual songs on my iPod:
1. Pink Floyd - 184
2. Neil Young (including Neil Young & Crazy Horse) - 178
3. Eagles - 96
4. Led Zeppelin - 82
5. Dire Straits - 72
6. Fleetwood Mac - 70
7. Bob Dylan - 68
8. Coldplay - 46
9. Mark Knopfler - 31
10. The Beach Boys - 27
If I lumped together my Mark Knopfler solo songs with the Dire Straits tracks, then my combined collection would add up to 103 tracks (third on the list), while Wishbone Ash would move up to tenth place with 24 songs.
In some ways, I think the total runtime of my tracks by each artist is a more telling measure - for instance, while I own 27 tracks by The Beach Boys, these are all from the same compilation album, whereas while I currently only have 14 Genesis songs on there, these come from two albums. Also, I'm aware that songs like The Battle Of Epping Forest and The Cinema Show are far longer than any of my Beach Boy songs, let alone Supper's Ready! Thus, I think it would be interesting to see how the standings are affected once I measure runtime rather than the number of songs.
The revised list is therefore as follows, with the runtime given for each:
1. Pink Floyd - 15h 11min
2. Neil Young/Neil Young & Crazy Horse - 14h 59min
3. Dire Straits - 7h 8min
4. Led Zeppelin - 6h 59min
5. Eagles - 6h 54min
6. Bob Dylan - 5h 35min
7. Fleetwood Mac - 4h 27min
8. Coldplay - 3h 33min
9. Mark Knopfler - 2h 31min
10. Wishbone Ash - 2h 20min
The top two remain the same, with Pink Floyd just ahead of Neil Young, but Dire Straits have overtaken Zep and the Eagles and stand third without the aid of solo Mark Knopfler, while Bob Dylan has moved ahead of Fleetwood Mac. The Beach Boys drop out of my top ten and are replaced by Wishbone Ash, and in fact the Beach Boys fall to 16th on this measure, also dropping below Genesis, Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Don Henley and even The Steve Miller Band (another artist I only own a compilation album for).
The runtime list is the more representative of my tastes on the whole as I'd say that nine of the ten artists on the list are definitely among my favourites and deserve to be there (the exception is Coldplay, a band I used to really like but don't care for as much now). The top ten makes more sense with Wishbone Ash - a band I rate very highly - replacing The Beach Boys, who I do enjoy when I'm in the mood for them but I can't honestly say are a true favourite of mine. The second top ten would be perfectly representative of my current tastes if Genesis, Purple or Skynyrd replaced Coldplay in the list.
