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Music

Journal sielwolf's Journal: Your Friends and Neighbors 11

Journal by sielwolf

This is kind of interesting. I saw this on LumisTheDragon's Last.fm Journal: a measurement of how "mainstream" your tastes are. Basically take your Top Ten Artists Overall, go to their Last.fm pages, find the number of Last.fm listeners (in the upper left), and average them for your rating.

Of course I've only been using this for the last two months so that will kind of skew the numbers a bit (as would probably the fact that Last.fm users would be a statistically random sample to extrapolate out into a global population but still). Since my listening is regularly what I've just bought that might completely undermine this. But, anyway, here is mine:

  1. Drexciya - 7529
  2. Detalles - 91
  3. The Persuasions - 387
  4. Final - 489
  5. razor x productions - 45
  6. Ricardo Villalobos -7542
  7. Grace Jones - 9259
  8. Scorn - 4345
  9. Sade - 36805
  10. TRS-80 - 923

Because I'm keen on statistics I'll drop three on ya. First:
Mean: 6741.5

Hmmm. Not bad. But means are highly susceptible to outliers (like, shit, the 36k who listen to Sade versus the 45 that listen to Razor X). And we can see that when we look at:

Standard Deviation: 11153.2

Ahh, an absolutely crazy high value. That tells us what we can plainly see: the distribution of the values are spread widely and not clustered close to the mean/average. If that mean was a ball player's shooting percentile, he'd be inconsistent as hell. So let's break out our second big gun:

Median: 2634

50% above, 50% below. Now let's compare these to Lumis's numbers:

Mean: 18992.6
Stddev: 9268.5
Median: 17593

You can see the effect. Pigface was his lowest listened group at 5.8k listeners. Most of them where scattered in the tens of thousands. Thus the similar mean and median. But what is more interesting is what it says about the listening habits of Last.fm itself.

Lumis's most listened to artist is KMFDM at 34.6k... almost as much as mine, Sade (36.8k)! A very well known industrial band just as popular as one of the biggest international R&B stars out there. Sade, who IRL goes platinum around the world. Now this isn't a value judgment in any way but just an interesting look at an online population versus the world. I guess you can even kind of see the European bias in that Pigface is just at 5.8k while the Euro 'Wave acts have listeners in the tens of thousands. Or that the very peculiar Techno/House tastes, Drexciya or Ricardo Villalobos, are almost as popular as Grace Jones.

So what does this all mean? We really can't trust the popularity of the numbers. I'd be misleading to say that anyone has more eclectic taste in music because they have a low mean and a high standard deviation. There is population skew: significant sub-populations of listeners who overrepresent their demographics. And that makes sense. The probable user of Last.fm is probably between the ages of 16 and 35, English speaking, owns a computer with an internet connection and a digital music collection. The fact that they probably have to be interested in music enough to be curious about their own listening habits probably is even more self-selecting. The genres represented best by those demographics then show up here strong: European club music, industrial/electro/dark wave, college rock. Of course this doesn't negate the existence of the mainest of the mainstream. The Beatles, Zeppelins and Floyds of the world will always dominate. It just takes the Long Tail and squishes it.

What these numbers tell us is just how much like the Last.fm population we are, which is interesting itself. So... me? I'm more of an outlier from that group that the good Lumis is. Though my standard deviation is so big that I'm not isolated out in my own little island of music. I'm in fact a wide beam cross a huge part of the population. The small, the great. All underneath the canopy. Hanging over everything, Damocles-like. That's probably pretty accurate. ;p

[I was tempted to set the topic as "Math" but I thought the better of it]

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Your Friends and Neighbors

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  • Can you fill out my top ten list for me and do all the calculations? KTHXBY!
    • Yeah, I thought you where going to get a Last.fm account. Whahappennndnendn? Of course you probably don't want me to guess your top ten:
      1. The Strokes
      2. That other band from New York... no, it's not the Strokes.
      3. Hey, I'm positive! It's not the Strokes, ok? Geez...
      4. Franz Ferdinand's second disc
      5. Maybe it was the Strokes...
      6. Wasn't there another band that came out as the same time? From NY?
      7. Interpol? No, that doesn't sound right.
      8. Air post-Moon Safari
      9. All those bands that are somehow headlining over the Duke Spirit
      10. Inte
  • boards of canada [www.last.fm] - 89968
    haujobb [www.last.fm] - 8536
    meat beat manifesto [www.last.fm] - 22494
    misfits [www.last.fm] - 53157
    front 242 [www.last.fm] - 23139
    they might be giants [www.last.fm] - 39277
    aphex twin [www.last.fm] - 108288
    amon tobin [www.last.fm] - 51514
    prodigy [www.last.fm] - 133404
    nomeansno [www.last.fm] - 4312

    my average is 53,408.9. i guess i'm just super main stream. if you want to figure the others, go for it.
    • Dang, I didn't realize BOC, Prodigy and AFX where so popular. Like AFX is Michael Jackson popular. I guess that makes Last.fm a very specific community ;) What is so surprising is that I thought Haujobb would be up there with the other Euro acts. Like at least at a 242 level. I guess it must be an Ohio thing but I always remember them being very central to the "think" of the music community. You could find Haujobb merch in most places. That one's probably the most surprising...
      • i guess that music attracts the same kind of people who think logging their music listening habits is a worthwhile endeavor. the other thing is that last.fm only tracks what people are listening to now after they've signed up.

        speaking of afx, i must wait until the weekend to pick up chosen lords. the suspense is killing me.
        • You gotta tell me what you think of Chosen Lords. What I've heard about the Analord releases have been wildly divergent. Some (*cough* Pitchforkmedia *coughcough*) I don't put too much stock in. If you gave it a nod I'd def take a look. Hmmm *pops up BLEEP in the browser*
          • i'm under some compulsive directive to buy anything i find by afx/aphex twin that contains new material. once i hear it i'll try to relate it to other RDJ releases instead of just proclaiming my avid enthusiasm for the newness of it.

            i was encouraged when you mentioned bleep thinking i'd get to at least sample the sounds. it appears it isn't there yet. hope once again becomes disappointment.
            • I guess it's because it's a Rephlex release... which (for some reason) Bleep doesn't carry. What type of BS is that? Rephlex almost seems recalcitrantly 20th Century.
          • haven't picked it up yet, but now i'm hesitant to buy it because it doesn't present any new material. have you heard the analord series? i should have put the clues together more quickly and figured out that chosen lords is just a selection of those tracks.

            my opinion of the analord series is that it's good but not fantastic. i understand that RDJ likes this kind of stuff and i can't fault him for making what he loves. the thing that is a bit of a let down is that it's all been done before. the thing th

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