Alcides Fonseca

Like last year, my 2025 music trends are quite steady:

My Last.FM shows me that I did not listen to a lot of new music. Here are the 2025 albums I have added to my library:

• Avantasia – Here be Dragons. In the same line of the previous trilogy of albums, with a callback to the original fantasy sounds. However, I still miss the opera style of the first couple of albums, while these latest 6 albums are more of a Tobias album with a few guests. I wanted more of Sign of the Cross epic song with several singers.
• Arjen Anthony Lucassen — “Songs No One Will Hear”. Ayreon has been my fix to this epic opera song. This is clearly not an epic Ayreon album, but Dr Slumber’s Blue Bus is a happy song that I just can’t enough.
• Halestorm – Everest It’s not one of the older albums “every song is a banger”, but it has a slower, more mellow tonality to it. In particular, my favorite song, Darkness Always Wins, gives me a déjà vu feeling, as if it was a song from my teens.
• Majestica – Power Train I mostly listen to it because of No Pain, No Gain which is one of the songs that I wake up to if I want energy right in the morning.
• Dynasty – Game of Faces Nills still has time to record with his original band (I love him in Amaranthe, despite having a slight preference for Jake’s era songs), but despite generally good, it does not have a really over-the-top song like earlier albums.

While not A-side, I have also enjoyed the two alternative releases by Linkin Park (“A Capella:https://consequence.net/2025/01/linkin-park-a-cappella-album-from-zero/) and The Mars Volta (Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del Vacio) but the original material still plays more on my speakers.

In hindsight, I have spent very little time searching for new bands, other than Majestica. One interesting Top40 source of recommendations is the Hitster boardgames, where you try to create a timeline of popular songs just by Spotify’s 30 second preview.

I watched the Champions League final the other day when it struck me: I’m basically watching millionaires all the time.
The players are millionaires, the coaches are millionaires, the club owners are millionaires. It’s surreal.
This week I watched John Wick Ballerina and, again, there’s Keanu Reeves, who is a millionaire, and Ana de Armas, who is as well.
Yesterday I heard about Trump and Musk fighting. They are not millionaires, they are billionaires!
As I’m writing this, I’m watching the Rock am Ring live stream, a music festival in Germany. Weezer is playing. These guys are all millionaires.
I don’t know what to make of it. It’s a strange realization, but one that feels worth sharing.

— Matthias Endler

The most impressive thing is that my grandparents did not do this. They barely listened to the radio, let alone TV, which was only available when they were 50+.

Personally, I have given up on watching TV or Radio. I watch the TV shows and Movies that I decide, and I listen to the music that I choose. I still watch millionaires, but I am intentional about it.

I recommend looking for the indie content, both TV and music. last.fm is a great source for the latter. Following movie critics blogs is another way of finding interesting TV. For me, I rely on jwz.

Throughout December, Spotify promotes their Wrapped feature, where users can share their music stats. Despite being an early Spotify adopter (back when I lived in Sweden, and knew all Swedish ads by heart, without understanding a word), I’ve been abandoning cloud-based solutions over the last decade.

Audio and Scrobbling Setup

For Music, my setup relies on a Synology NAS at home, running Plex for all my movies, tv shows and music. I buy songs from artists directly if possible, otherwise I buy DRM-free versions on iTunes Store, which Apple is trying to hide more and more in their (awful) desktop Music.app.

For tracking, I’ve been a Last.fm user since 2006, with a few gaps in my scrobbling due to using Apple Music or Spotify. But, when configured, Plex scrobbles all my plays (regardless of being mobile, desktop or CarPlay) and this is the first year I can properly share all my stats, wrapped-style.

One of the caveats in this report is that Plex shuffle is not really random. And I don’t mean the perceived randomness, but rather that Plex by default is more likely to include highly-rated songs when shuffling artists or playlists, creating a bubble effect. For 2025, I’ve disabled this feature to try and identify the differences. Personally, I would like this setting to be enabled when playing my whole library, but disabled for playlists and artists, as my whole library has many albums just for the sake of completeness.

2024 Wrapped

I guess my 2024’s report was not surprising. Early in the year I found out about D’artagnan’s two English songs: C’est la vie (a translation of their German original) and We’re Gonna be Drinking, a pub-style Celtic rock shanty.

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Metal Opera super-group Avantasia (And got to see them live in Madrid!) with their latest album A Paranormal Evening with the Moonflow Society, which follows the style of the previous one (they frequently do album trilogies, like my favorite fantasy authors).

And despite being released halfway through November, Linkin Park’s first album with Emily Armstrong From Zero became my daily driver until today. Heavy is the Crown is a complete banger, and The Emptiness Machine, Over Each Other and Two Faced round up the playlist. Now, a lot of folks think they should have started a new band, but I actually think this more pre-meteora style than the last Chester-featured albums. Several bands go through multiple vocalists (most notably Nightwish) when it’s a project led by another musician (Shinoda in this case). Bands are just like companies, they have a life outside of their members, and Theseus’s Ships can happen!

Symphonic and Power Metal artists are a big chunk of my Scrobbles: Avantasia, Amaranthe, Kamelot, Arion, Ad Infinitum, Ayreon, Dynasty, Epic, Aina, Exit Eden, DragonForce and so on. After Amaranthe being the top band in 2023, they have kept in the top-played rotation, joined by DragonForce’s Doomsday Party and Kamelot’s Under Grey Skies ballad.

Ad Infinitum was my favorite newly-discovered band these last couple of years. All three opera-style albums are powerful and are as catchy as pleasant to listen to while working. Amaranthe kept the good pace coming with The Catalyst, of which Damnation Flame is a fantastic demo (pun intended), keeping the fast-paced and symphonic style post Jake’s departure.

This was a fun post to write, and let’s see what 2025 brings us (really excited for Avantasia’s Here Be Dragons).