"Someone next door had been playing heavy metal music all night long. I
didn’t get a wink of sleep."
"Someone next door was playing heavy metal music all night long. I didn’t get a wink of sleep.
The first uses the past perfect continuous tense and the second uses the past continuous tense. Both appear to be expressing the context for the second sentence (about not sleeping). This is a typical use of both tenses. The past perfect form in the first sentences makes it clear that the music began before the not sleeping; we can surmise this from the second sentence as well, but the verb tense in itself doesn't emphasise it as much as in the first one.
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