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Jun 8

Last.fm Mainstream-O-Meter

Posted on Friday, June 8, 2007 in Uncategorized

mainstream-o-meter

http://mainstream.vincentahrend.com

How it works: The Mainstream-O-Meter calculates your mainstreamness by comparing the listener count of your favorite bands to the average listener count of the five bands who have the most listeners among Last.fm-users.

Of course, the results may be different from what you would’ve thought of as mainstream. Some bands which have a lot of listeners in real life don’t have a large fanbase on Last.fm since people who use this service tend to be younger and more experienced with computers than the average person. Because of the restricted number of users, some genres like classical music and countries like India or the People’s Republic of Chine are really underrepresented on Last.fm.

Since some users listen to all of their top artists equally while others have one top artist they listen to 99 percent of the time, the Meter also takes into account how much you listen to these bands in comparison. The artist you listen to most always gets a weight of 100%, while every other artist’s play count in your profile is then compared to this.

Bring on the comments

  1. im 37.27% mainstream, i guess oingo boingo isn’t very mainstream.

  2. i thought dan was going to be most mainstream but it turns out bnims is with 41.03%

  3. 27.54% for me!

    fun fact: the beatles are 101.42% mainstream!

  4. what’s really strange is that the peak of the bell curve is even less mainstream than me (27.54%). so that means that more people (who use last.fm) listen to music that no one else does than share musical interests.

  5. It’s a flawed way of looking at things admittedly. It’s mainstream for last.fm users, not truly mainstream, which would be more country and Clay Aiken crap. So I get hit hard for having Sufjan as my #1. He’s hardly mainstream, but really is for last.fm.

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