A selection of mind-blowing facts about music from 2024

It's time to start the end-of-year office cleanup. Prepare for a major data dump.

My home office sometimes looks as if a Category 5 hurricane swept through. There are piles of magazines, teetering towers of books, records and CDs that have so far evaded being filed, and dozens of sticky notes and scraps of paper featuring near-illegible scribbles signifying… something. There are also special folders on three different computers filled with bits cut and pasted from websites, newsletters and social media.

This organization catastrophe is the result of 11 months of reading, researching, surfing, scrolling and otherwise sourcing out material for all my music writing, radio shows, podcasts and whatever other assignments fall in my lap. Whenever I run across something that I think might be useful, I squirrel it away somehow, eventually finding a home for the factoid somewhere in my content factory.

Well, most of these bits of trivia find a home. By the end of November, there’s plenty of material that’s orphaned and unused for any number of reasons. I could simply sweep everything into a big recycling bin, file the books, records, and CDs, and continue to ignore those files on my computers. That seems wrong, though, so each December, I cobble together a special Ongoing History of New Music show called 60 Mind Blowing Facts About Music in 60 Minutes. It is aired on the radio before being converted to a podcast so that the whole world may have their minds blown.

However, even with this inventory clearance, I still haven’t used all my cool factoids for 2024. Fortunately, I have this space every week. Here then are an additional 10 mind-blowing items about music. What you do with this information is up to you.

My inbox is constantly clogged with surveys and polls that are cleverly disguised ads for some company or service. Most come from online casinos looking to drag people back to their sites in hopes of seeing more wagers. British agencies are especially fond of this approach.

A cloud storage company recently sent me the results of a bacterial study that says the average set of headphones is dirtier than a typical toilet seat. On average, 1,073 bacteria colonies were found on an average pair of headphones, compared with 425 on a toilet seat. Laptops are also teaming with microbes, with a bacteria colony count of 645. Phones are surprisingly clean, with an average of 187 colonies. Staphylococcus spp. and Micrococcus spp. were the most common bugs found on tech devices.

I won’t be sharing headphones with anyone anymore.

In 2002, Shazam started a service for British music fans. If a song came on, you pulled out your dumbphone, dialled a number and then held up your phone so it could “hear” the song you were trying to ID. Once it did, you got a text message with the title and artist. Since then, it’s been turned into a smartphone app, bought by Apple, and adapted for a cheapo primetime TV game show. Earlier this month, it was announced that Shazam has identified 100 billion songs. The app averages about 2.6 billion tags a month and has somewhere around 300 million monthly users.