The MP3 Standings

 by whiteray

As of this morning, the total number of mp3s in the RealPlayer is 84,064, still about ten thousand fewer than there were when my external hard drive crashed during the summer of 2017. I’ve replaced most of the important stuff; every once in a while, I recall an obscure album I once had and learn that I’ve never replaced it; most of the time, it’s only available for more cash than I care to invest. 

(I’ve used versions of the RealPlayer to play and sort my music since early 2000, when I first went online. It’s had numerous updates since then, of course, but sometime about five years ago, the company that owns it updated it in ways that no longer served my purpose, so whenever I get a new desktop, I head to a place called oldversion.com to find a suitably aged edition of the software. It can be kind of clunky, but I use it because it allows me to sort my mp3s by numerous categories: artist, year, album title, or even by single word, so if I want to see how many tracks have, oh, the word “grace” in their titles, I can do so. There are likely other mp3 players/storage programs that can do that, too, but I’m happy with what I’ve got. [There are, it turns out, twenty-three tracks among those 84,000-some mp3s with the word “grace” in their titles. My favorite among them is likely Richie Haven’s “By The Grace Of The Sun” from 2004.]) 

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to see which artists are most represented among those nearly 84,000 tracks. Here are the current totals. (I’ll miss some; for instance, I’ll easily combine the total of tracks credited only to Bruce Springsteen with those credited to Springsteen and the E Street Band and the Sessions band, but I have some tracks out there with the Boss dueting with others. Those won’t get counted.) Here are the top fifteen. 

1,076: Bob Dylan
800: Bruce Springsteen
477: Beatles
342: Sebastian
341: Chris Rea
303: Eric Clapton
290: Nanci Griffith
271: John Barry
270: Jimmy McGriff
256: Rory Block
252: Cowboy Junkies
250: Richie Havens
241: Ferrante & Teicher
238: The Moody Blues
234: Frank Sinatra 

The next fifteen are The Band, Gordon Lightfoot, Joe Cocker, Carole King, Ramin Djawadi (who scored the Game Of Thrones series), Muddy Waters, Trevor Morris (who scored, among other projects, Vikings, The Tudors and The Borgias), Etta James, the Indigo Girls, Fleetwood Mac, Maria Muldaur, the Bee Gees, Clannad, Al Hirt, and Paul McCartney. 

The Beatles’ total has risen appreciably since the last time I checked the numbers; over the course of the past two years, I’ve added to the CD stacks the three 1990s anthologies and the four CDs’ worth of performances recorded live at the BBC, all of which I previously had only as LPs. 

The last things I added to the RealPlayer? The 1972 album by Danny O’Keefe titled simply O’Keefe, newly ripped files of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, a single edit of Carole King’s “Corazon,” the 2000 album Rose by Danish singer Lis Sørensen as a single mp3 (as well as a corresponding single mp3 of the tunes from Rose as originally recorded by Danish singer Sebastian), albums by Keb’ Mo’ and Shawn Colvin, and anthologies of Benny Goodman, Bob Marley & The Wailers, and Tommy James & The Shondells. 

And tucked in among the last things I added to the RealPlayer is a single track that came my way via Facebook following the death of Ronnie Spector the other week: A 1977 take on Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye To Hollywood” by Spector backed by the E Street Band. It’s one of the better things I’ve heard in a long time: