Presently, I play a great deal of David Bowie. It is always there when I listen on the way to work, whilst I work, when I eat. Music is like that for me, my high quality music player being one of my prized possessions, and I find that to have a soundtrack to life makes everything more real.
My boy accused me of having nothing but Bowie on my music player, as it seemed to dominate every playlist, even on the shuffle. I thought I would find out how true that was and set out the stats.
It turns out that 17.5% of tracks from all those possible are going to be Bowie, which is almost one in five. Looking further into the stats I thought the rest of the details were interesting. At the moment my player is loaded with a ‘best of’ selection on my Pono Player. I eschewed the usual method of adding entire albums and folders in order to bring in many artists I had not heard in a long time. This means the list is quite representative of my collection tastes. I went through everything and asked myself which albums absolutely had to be there in their entirety, then which tracks I couldn’t live without. This gives an idea as to what dominates my internal landscape. These are the core musical elements.
| Artists | Tracks | Per cent |
| David Bowie | 559 | 17.2 |
| Kate Bush | 129 | 4.0 |
| Nine Inch Nails | 104 | 3.2 |
| Tori Amos | 104 | 3.2 |
| Adventure Time | 93 | 2.9 |
| Radiohead | 77 | 2.4 |
| My Chemical Romance | 65 | 2.0 |
| Tom Waits | 50 | 1.5 |
| Elbow | 47 | 1.4 |
| Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst | 42 | 1.3 |
| Ben Folds | 40 | 1.2 |
| Rufus Wainwright | 38 | 1.2 |
| Manic Street Preachers | 37 | 1.1 |
| Marilyn Manson | 36 | 1.1 |
| Elvis Costello | 33 | 1.0 |
| Velvet Underground | 27 | 0.8 |
| Bob Dylan | 27 | 0.8 |
| Nick Cave | 22 | 0.7 |
| Other | 1742 | 53.6 |
| Total | 3250 |
Adventure Time snippets are not surprising, as they are all tiny mp3s and all of them very short. I don’t mind that, they deserve to be there in my brain, as much as the rest. They were not chosen with preference but they were so small I did not mind leaving them there, they always make me smile and it’s great when one pops up and my boy and I can sing along. Those are the outliers.
Lossless: lossless (70.9%) vs lossy (29.1%) – The amount of tracks that are super high-quality vs low, mediocre quality.
Bit Rate: 24 (22.0%) vs 16 (48.9%) – Even though the vast majority of tracks are high-quality FLAC files, there is still only a small amount of fully high quality. Out of the 70.9% lossless files, only 22% of them are in 24 bit. The Pono Player is designed to excel at playing lossless and super high fidelity music.
After a while though I found I was missing out on tracks that I simply cannot get in high quality, so the lower quality CD rips and mp3s crept in.
Sample Rate
- 192,000 Hz (3.1%);
- 176,400 Hz (0.5%)
- 96,000 Hz (11.3%);
- 88,200 Hz (2.0%);
- 48,000 Hz (1.1%);
- 44,100 Hz (79.1%);
- 22,050 Hz (2.9%);
And of course, the majority of these super high quality songs are David Bowie tracks. Those 559 files represent his 26 studio albums, a few soundtracks, b-sides and extra tracks, remixes, live albums, special rare tracks gathered by rabidly holy, keepers-of-the-lore. Although there are reasons to be listening to DB at the moment, this is actually pretty normal. His music has been a constant since the early nineties.
It started with Huw (or was it Hew), a college friend with shock of Serious Moonlight hair, and devotion to all things Bowie. Tin Machine had just been announced and he had been popping with amazement. I had just shrugged, so he made it a mission to educate me and passed along a specially selected tape, so I could learn. I wonder how he is coping with the news.
By the time Heathen had appeared I was deeply linked into the way of Bowie. Heathen is an album I still consider amongst the greatest of all time, of all artists.
By the time I was married I had merged my life, my mind and my Bowie collection with that of my love. She educated me about the early glam and Berlin-period Bowie and I, in turn, showed her post-nineties Bowie.
By the time I got to see the Bowie Is exhibition, it was in London 2013. I had prepared by listening to every album in order. A kind of cleansing before a pilgrimage. Walking around that exhibition I could see, not only the more recent connections to my life, but also the many connections to other artists that had been influenced and influenced me in turn. I saw then that the tiny memory card that held every Bowie song available was like a hologram of culture. It reflected back through time like a fractal of influence, reaching from the early impact of culture that formed Bowie’s work and on into every aspect of modern culture and art that was informed by Bowie’s work.
That upsight led me to begin writing a novel and to chip away at the core of that idea until I had a complete manuscript.
By the time we got to late last year I found myself surrounded in artefacts. Three limited edition prints on our wall (wise man Bowie, the Art God), a life-cast of his face from the middle age (the Prime, the lone walker), a life cast of early Bowie (the youthful fool, forever searching for tissues for his eyes), a large collection of books, magazines, and every piece of music I could find.
Then, most regrettably, David Bowie sublimed and was gone.
This is one of the reasons that nothing seems to have happened since January. One of the reasons that everything seems to have happened. I finished the book and submitted it. I continued to absorb every interview, appearance, live show and reference. I continued to collect his music. Although it has taken me a long time to gather my thoughts, today is a Sunday in June and I am still listening to non-stop Bowie in everything I do. Still surrounded. Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.
“Everything has changed
For in truth it’s the beginning of nothing
And nothing has changed
Everything has changed
For in truth it’s the beginning of an end
And nothing has changed
Everything has changed” – Sunday, Heathen.