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Last.fm Reveals Its Top 40 Most Played Albums Of The Year

9:05 a.m. · December 15, 2010 · by Nick Neyland

There are many end-of-year charts besieging the Internet at present (you can read the Prefix lists here) but few of them are based on the kind of cold hard stats that Last.fm can produce. The site provides a list of its most listened to albums at the end of every year, and the 2010 incarnation takes in data for records released between Oct. 1, 2009 through Oct. 31, 2010.

The list doesn’t include EPs, greatest hits collections, or singles, it’s just an old fashioned look at how actual albums fared among the site’s listeners. There are a few surprises—for one thing, Mumford & Sons came in at No. 2, with a jaw-dropping 11,613,844 plays, and Ke$ha was the No. 1 artist, with a huge 15,915151 plays.

It’s worth bearing in mind that some of these albums have had more time to register plays over that period than others, with Ke$ha’s Animal being available since Jan. 1 and Mumford & Sons’ Sigh No More being released in February. The highest placed hip-hop album is Eminem’s Recovery, and the biggest surprise in the indie rock stakes is probably the National’s album gaining a top 10 slot. You can read the entire top 40 over here, and the top 10 looks like this:

01 Ke$ha: Animal

02 Mumford & Sons: Sigh No More

03 Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

04 Gorillaz: Plastic Beach

05 Vampire Weekend: Contra

06 Eminem: Recovery

07 30 Seconds to Mars: This Is War

08 Rihanna: Rated R

09 Katy Perry: Teenage Dream

10 The National: High Violet