Top Albums Grid

For the last couple years I have been scrobbling all the music I listen to with last.fm (I dabbled a bit in previous years, but it has been continuous since January 2021). Inspired by a friend, I decided to make a collage of my most listened to albums. Fortunately the last.fm API provides urls for album artworks, so it was a mercifully straightforward process to pull the album artworks for my top ~500 albums.

In my eternal quest for RSI, my initial attempt involved manually organising the artworks in GIMP. While this provided an enjoyable avenue to reflect on, and redisover, some of my favourite music, I eventually lost patience and reverted to coding it up in Mathematica. This of course came with its own issues

1. In my infinite wisdom I used the default RGB color space, concocting progressively more elaborate functions involving the RGB channels to sort the images in an aesthetically pleasing way before it occured to me that a color space that encoded hue might be easier. I eventually settled on sorting the artworks horizontally using the luminosity in the LCHColor space, and vertically using Z - (X+Y)/2 in the XYZColor space.
2. I spent a lot of time using DominantColors[] before I realised that ImageMeasurements[#, "Mean"]& actually gave me better results.

I like the result. The ordering isn’t perfect, so I would like to revisit it at some point – either to commit to ordering the artworks manually, or improving on the way I coded it. But in the mean time this version has been printed and sits on my bedroom wall.