For someone who loves the album rock format, I listen to full new albums straightthrough suprsingly rarely. For the first few months I have an album I tend to just listen to the 2-5 songs that I love. It takes much of a year before I'll start listening straightthrough regularly.

This makes me a singularly poor recipient of mix tapes. The person making the tape thinks a lot about how to put the songs together into a coherent whole, and then I spend the next month listening to 4 of the songs in no apparent order.

For example, on the mix Alec just made me, half the songs have been listened to 5-7 times (the number of times I've played it straightthrough) while another few are in the high teens (Changes, Left and Leaving, The Only Living Boy in New York), a couple are in the high twenties (Nothing Better, The Blowers Daughter), and Come Back from San Francisco by the Magnetic fields has hit 38 (good for 12 on my most listened list).

The most listened list is odd since it mostly measures how long the initial burst of listening to it lasts. A typical song on there hits the mid 30s in a couple weeks and then never goes past there.