If I were to write a list of my ten favourite things, LastFM would probably be in it (the others being: lentil soup, Summer Roberts, Autumnal colours, Saturday night pizza night, Alan Shearer, Flickr, a milky cup of tea, the smell on hot days after it’s rained and in-ear headphones).

Having said that, its main premise, of suggesting music I’d like, really doesn’t work for me. I know it works for other people, so it must just be me. I think the problem may be that my music taste is too mainstream. I do like some stuff that would be considered cool with the indie kids, but I also like a bit of pop.

The typical LastFM user is going to be pretty tech savvy, which for some reason tends to coincide with people who like to listen to as new and as obscure music as possible. Why nerds don’t listen to old or mainstream music in itself would be an interesting sociological experiment.

Just look at a few total plays stats to prove my point. Britney Spears, played: 6,318,579 times. Modest Mouse, played: 23,671,229 times. I’m a big fan of both, but I know if you took a sample of the whole world’s music listening population, Modest Mouse would not be four times more popular than Britney. Death Cab for Cutie, played: 34,656,728, which is three times more than Madonna (12,293,959).

I could spend the next 50 years of my life happily analysing the stats from LastFM. One more interesting thing I think I’ve found. If you go to the top tracks page they show the week’s most popular tracks. They display a normalised bar chart showing the number of listeners against the number of plays for each song (they have to normalise it as you’re always going to get more plays than listeners). Anyway, as a consequence of the normalisation, if the number of plays line is longer than the number of listeners line it tends to be a new track, where as an older track will have the number of listeners as the longest line. It makes sense, people tend to listen to a new track on repeat, so you get many plays per user. Just seems kind of neat that you can work out a track’s age by the proportion of unique listeners to total plays.

• The pop princesses aren’t going to like you more just because you convince more people to listen to them. It’s not like all of Girls Aloud would appear on your doorstep if you listened to them more on Last.FM.

  Having derided your taste in pop… actually this is pretty interesting. I’m intrigued by the corollary between tech savvy people and Long Tail obscurity. I guess I fit that pattern pretty well. One of these days I suppose I ought to sequentially scrobble my entire CD collection though… then you’d get a bunch of old and very mainstream stuff.

  … and who is Summer Roberts?
  (oh, right. The O.C. *sigh*)

  Comment by andyp — October 11, 2007 @ 6:52 am

• Actually, Girls Aloud were kind of the exception to the rule. They have close to two million, which considering they’re UK only (I think) is not that bad. It is odd to think the whole data set has got pushed towards the long tail at the expense of the popular mainstream stuff. Not sure they can do anything about it either, but interesting anyway.

  Comment by Darren Shaw — October 11, 2007 @ 7:36 am

• Is it only that mainstream pop isn’t as popular? Or is it cos we’re less willing to publicly admit that we listen to it?

  Am I the only person who occasionally disables scrobbling when Media Player’s shuffle comes across a less ‘cool’ track?

  Comment by Dale Lane — October 11, 2007 @ 4:12 pm

• your top 10 things describe you well … I like that
  What about swimming, saunas, (fresh, none-almost-out-of-date)hula hoops and warm frosties? :o)

  Comment by Hanan — October 11, 2007 @ 9:57 pm

• Oh no, you’re right. I’m going to have to rethink this list. I’d definitely have to have warm microwaved Frosties, but only in Winter… Maybe I could make it a seasonal list? What would be on your list?

  Comment by Darren Shaw — October 11, 2007 @ 10:05 pm

• Dale, I sometimes go back and retrospectively edit my Recently Played… I was just talking about this over on Jasmin’s blog - does it make us less authentic if we do that?

  Comment by andyp — October 14, 2007 @ 4:36 pm

• Interesting analysis of user “eclecticness”

  Comment by andyp — October 14, 2007 @ 7:19 pm

• I spotted you listening to JoJo too Andy!

  Comment by Darren Shaw — October 15, 2007 @ 8:39 am

• I’d guess that last.fm’s makeup is in (some) part due to the nature of how networks grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the most early users listened to indie music and then told their friends and so on.

  I don’t have any empirical data on it but Friendster appeared to show a similar phenomenon when it started. There was a time when it seemed that everyone on Friendster was gay — the invites seemed to fly through the GLBT community.

  Something else happened on orkut where the crowd was very techie (due to their limited invite system) and then the whole country of Brazil took over.

  Another possible explanations for last.fm’s ‘indieness’– it’s possible that users are only scrobbling from their computers (not iPods) and they only listen to their moody Decemberists tracks while working.

  Comment by Frank Jania — October 18, 2007 @ 12:04 pm