In what’s now becoming an annual tradition, here’s what last.fm considers my top 20 most listened to artists of 2007. Some serious surprises in there. I’ve listened to a lot of music this year and some of these I hardly remember hearing at all.

1. The Fiery Furnaces
2. Beastie Boys
3. New Young Pony Club
4. Kings of Leon
5. !!!
6. The Go! Team
7. Cansei de Ser Sexy
8. Broken Social Scene
9. Prefuse 73
10. Hot Chip
11. Death From Above 1979
12. The Arcade Fire
13. Ratatat
14. Four Tet
15. Klaxons
16. Ikara Colt
17= Man or Astro-man?
17= Disney
19= Django Reinhardt
19= Justice
19= MSTRKRFT

Massive oddities include Disney (playing the Musical History of Disneyland just once accounts for 65 tracks!) and Django Reinhardt (his haunting version of La Mer/Beyond the Sea from Bioshock made me search out more by this Jazz great. More Bioshock soundtrack tips here, incidentally).

Some old favourites like Man or Astro-man? and Ikara Colt have re-entered as well, thanks to iPod shuffle.

It doesn’t look like DoCopenhagen have compiled their own list of top music videos for this year so you’re going to have to make do with this top 50 from Pitchfork. Still marvellous.

Haunted Mansion/Bela Lugosi’s Dead: A superb mashup of the Ghost Host narration from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead.

Apple have just announced, as many have predicted, the iPod Touch. Basically an iPhone without the phone. It comes in 8Gb and 16Gb flavours (which is far too small a capacity for me to even consider buying — I have enough trouble with 60Gb!) and has built-in wifi for browsing the web and spending your hard-earned cash at iTunes while you wait for your delayed train (or while at their new friend Starbucks’ place). Still, it looks cool.

Also announced:

• An all-metal 160Gb iPod classic
• A chubby new 8 or 16Gb iPod nano (with coverflow and video playback)
• iPod nano in new colours
• and a cheaper 8Gb iPhone (no 4Gb, it seems)

If you want more geekery, Engadget have a hands-on with both the iPod nano and iPod touch.

Aleks has a round-up of Secondfest, the Second Life virtual festival that happened over the weekend.

Musician and friend Andy Fosberry, the guy behind Ironlight River, has just (well, a couple of weeks ago!) released his very first EP, “Earthlights Through A Wind Coloured Glass”. Check out the tracks for yourself on his myspace page.

Then buy a copy for yourself from iTunes! Also available on eMusic and Rhapsody

Update: You can now also buy a real life physical CD version via Made to Order Records for a very reasonable £3.

A fantastic video for “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time” by Jarvis Cocker.

Classic FM are currently offering a free 14 day trial of their music download service where you can download up to 35 MP3s for nothing.

Here’s my top 20 artists of 2006 according to play counts from last.fm. It’s not entirely representative because it doesn’t record tracks played on my iPod, or in the lounge at home, but interesting(ish) none the less!

1 Broken Social Scene
2 Wolf Parade
3 Be Your Own Pet
3 Rilo Kiley
5 Ikara Colt
6 The Fiery Furnaces
7 Beastie Boys
8 Nada Surf
9 Interpol
10 Editors
11 The Duke Spirit
12 Buzzcocks
13 Arctic Monkeys
13 The Arcade Fire
15 Man or Astro-man?
16 Mindless Self Indulgence
17 The Jam
18 We Are Scientists
19 Boards of Canada
20 Sunset Rubdown
20 Howling Bells
20 Kings of Convenience

Here we are again at the only time of year where you can get away with playing cheesy shmaltz without friends and family questioning your taste/sanity/sexuality. What, you have no Bing Crosby lying around at home? Don’t worry, there’s a solution.

I really should have mentioned Pandora before because it’s a fantastic way of finding new music or listening to the kind of music you like when you don’t have your collection to hand. This, of course, means you have endless access to as much Bing, Nat, Louis and, uh, Regis Philbin as you can possibly handle this holiday season. Here’s the trick from lifehacker.com:

Think of someone you’d like to hear some holiday cheer from, say, Bing Crosby. Tell Pandora you want to create a new station, but instead of just writing in the artist’s name, type in “Bing Crosby (holiday)”.

If you really want to show everyone what a Christmas mood you’re in, you can log your Pandora plays to your last.fm profile with the ingeniously named pandora.fm.

Go now, and enjoy that endless Christmas crooning!