Listened in 2008

1. Beirut
2. Neutral Milk Hotel
3. Ted Leo and The Pharmacists
4. Dan Deacon
5. Ween
6. Sacred Harp singers
7. Morrissey
8. Portishead
9. Brian Eno
10. The Smiths
11. The Cinematic Orchestra
12. Elvis Costello
13. Björk
14. Devendra Banhart
15. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone
16. Radiohead
17. Electrelane
18. Feist
19. Ernst Reijseger And Mola Sylla
20. Talking Heads
21. Girl Talk
22. The Books
23. Julee Cruise
24. Aesop Rock
25. Dan Bern

Compared to my top artists from 2006 only three remained at the top for 2008: Elvis Costello, Ted Leo, Brian Eno. Some of the new entries, however, weren’t so much as new to my ears as they were to being mp3s: artists like Morrissey and Ween were simply on CD in 2006 before I started migrating them over to the computer. Some artists are genuine newcomers, like Girl Talk, Julee Cruise, Dan Deacon and Beirut; others, like Aesop Rock and The Books, had been forgotten on an external hard drive and resurrected.
*I upgraded Last.fm’s plug-in near the end of the 2008; previously it did not include iPod play counts.