Something doesn’t add up! I’ve just gotten my Replay 2021 report from Apple Music, my primary music service. It tells me I spent 1,095 hours listening to music in 2021, but that I listened to 2,663 different artists! That’s a lot of artists, more than 2 per hour.

I have much on constantly, during my commute, while working, even lulling me to sleep. I also listen to many different types of music, depending on my mood and what I’m doing. I sample a lot of different music from many different genres, ranging from the catch-all label of “World Music,” to jazz, rock, blues, and classical.

I listen to a fair amount of jazz, and classical music, which often has more than one credited artist on a track. Popular music is much less generous in acknowledging all performers on a track than are those genres. But the most logical explanation is that I listen to many cast albums from musicals. Those albums inevitably have multiple artists on each track.

This hypothesis is supported by the list of my 15 top artists. Two of them, M. Pokora and Nico Lilliu I’ve only listened to on the “Robin de Bois” (Robin Hood) cast album. The other 13 are probably on the list of artists I listen to the most in any given year: American Aquarium (I spent 26 hours listening to them in 2021), Prince (22 hours), Ryan Bingham (17), Tyler Childers (14), Sturgill Simpson (11), Mavis Staples (9), Jason Mraz (9 hours), Bruce Springsteen (9), Langhorne Slim (8), Passenger (8), and new favorite artists Adia Victoria (7) and Anthony da Costa (9).

The artists behind 5 of the albums I listened to most in 2021 are not even on that list of 15 artists I listened to the most. They are Anderson East‘s “Maybe We Never Die,” The Lone Bellow‘s “Half Moon Light,” Dolly Parton’s “Dumplin,” Zachary Williams’s “Dirty Camaro,” and Leon Bridges‘s “Gold-Diggers Sound.” The list is rounded out by an old album I only learned about this year, “The Harry Smith Project Live.”

Anyway, if you want to check out the 100 songs I listened to most, here is that playlist.