23 July 2010
Last week a question occurred to me: what interesting things can you find out by playing around with Last.FM listening data? Last.FM themselves offer a fair bit of extra analysis to users in their “Playground” section, but it’s all to do with individual listeners or their networks (or “neighbourhoods”). I wanted to see how much LFM data could tell us about specific artists, and how people listen to them.
So using the most topline, publically available data possible – the artist pages and charts of most-played tracks – what can we find out? I created a few metrics which I could generate (by hand! no programmer I!) in 20 seconds or so for each artist and set to work populating a mini database out of the artists on the overall LFM charts, then the ones on my personal charts, then anyone I thought might be interesting. The results are this series of three – somewhat wonkish – posts: the conclusions will be in Part III so if you don’t fancy seeing me crunch numbers (albeit very EASY numbers) wait around for that.
Here’s what I came up with! more »
Tom in FT • 3 Comments
I have a great big post on the boil looking at Last FM stats but in case it doesn’t get finished here’s a quiz for you. NO PEEKING – Peeking meaning no going to Last FM and checking the answers.
The quiz is very easy! All you have to do is guess which is the highest ranked track on Last FM by each of these artists. LFM’s public data only goes back 6 months, which makes a difference in some cases, and it hasn’t got the VERY latest hits (i.e. Katy Perry’s #1 is “I Kissed A Girl” not “California Gurls” let alone “Teenage Dream”). For some of the listed acts it is the obvious track, for others it isn’t, this is where blind luck your skill and judgement will play a role.
So here goes! Quiz under the cut, answers in the comments box and I’ll let you know who does best. more »
Tom in FT • 18 Comments
6 July 2010
(I originally posted this in my MP3 posting experiment, It Took Seconds – I’m going to make an effort to reformat selected Tumblr posts for FT from now on, since this is and should be my ‘main’ blog outlet.)
Candy Flip’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” is an interesting record because it manages to be basely cynical and winningly naive at the same time. On the cynical side, yes, this is a brazen cash in. Perpetually-fucked singing and a beat lazily gesturing in the rough direction of hip-hop were the currency of hip British pop in 1990 and Candy Flip were well aware of it. At the time I assumed that THE MAN was behind them but whether they were “manufactured” or not there’s no need for them to have been. The boundaries between a novelty single, an underground sensation and a pop smash have never been thinner than at this point in time, and it was a good time for people who had an idea for a record to actually go through with it. more »
Tom in FT • 10 Comments
25 May 2010
Kat Stevens, having skillfully managed Slovenia into the Pop World Cup’s Round of 16, will be liveblogging the semifinals of that other, slightly more Swarovski-crystal-laden pop competition, the Eurovision Song Contest. It all kicks off tonight at 8pm on The Singles Jukebox.
And don’t forget that the polls are still open for Nigeria v Ghana and Cameroon v Spain in the Pop World Cup 2010. So go vote! And reduce the chances of another controversial result.
Update! Tom Ewing and Mike Atkinson will also be taking part!
Tracer Hand in FT • 4 Comments
4 May 2010
I am really excited about this one! For the last several years, Mike at Troubled-Diva has been running a fantastic feature called Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? The format is simple: the Top 10s from today, 10 years ago, 20 years ago and so on are run against one another, one number at a time – so first we hear all the No.10s, then all the No.9s, and so on. Votes are cast, tallied, and after much horse-trading and POP SCIENCE an answer to the featured question is arrived at (Here’s the feature as, er, featured at Troubled Diva).
Summer 1960: Kids prepare to battle the future in a time-spanning pop war.
Mike isn’t blogging so much at T-D now and felt it was time to shake the Which Decade format up. He offered to do it here. Since it’s a) a great idea and b) proven excellent fun, I was absolutely delighted to agree.
So as of next week, Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? 2010 will be appearing at freakytrigger.co.uk, alongside your regular pop features. The top tens of 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 will be abasing themselves to curry YOUR favour. History lesson, all-in pop wrestle and generational WAR all in one ticktastic feature.
Quite frankly, it is going to be BRILLIANT.
Tom in FT • 24 Comments
This is the sixth of the eight matches in the Round of Sixteen – already! Neither Weston Debevec’s Cameroon nor Steve M’s New Zealand would necessarily be high on most lists of favourites for the tournament, but it’s not hard to find those who’ll rep for either nation as really major pop players. A fascinating game in prospect.
This match closes at midnight on Monday 10th May more »
Tim in FT • 21 Comments
30 April 2010
I’ll tell you what pop’s missing at the moment and that’s rivalries. Not feuds, we have plenty of feuds, there’s a feud a day on Twitter I think. Feuds are great but the emphasis is on the stars themselves and what they think or feel. Rivalries are different. They’re about the fans, about what stars mean on a social level.
The great necessary thing about rivalries is that if you’re an outsider they should baffle you a bit. Take That and East 17 – seriously? What’s the difference? They’re both boy bands right, both manufactured, you shouldn’t be listening to either of them, you should be listening to oh, I don’t know, Consolidated or something. And isn’t the rivalry all a hype thing anyway? I had those conversations a few times in 1993.
But hype is the brassiere of pop rivalries more »
Tom in FT • 8 Comments
28 April 2010
The Official Charts Company have launched their new portal, which (if you dig about a bit), offers week-by-week archived charts going back to 1960 with links to buy where such a thing is possible.
The centrepiece of the portal though is of course the charts themselves. All thirty-three of them. Yes, THIRTY-THREE. The OCC do an awful lot of work it seems and I suspect go mostly unthanked for it. So when you’re asked “Who’s at Number One?” you could happily answer any of the following: more »
Tom in FT • 7 Comments
8 April 2010
You may be loving the Pop World Cup (we hope you are!). You may be thoroughly sick of it (in which case – sorry! But we’re more than halfway through now). But I hope you’d agree that the basic question it’s asking – how do you represent a country’s music? – is an interesting one. Certainly in the comments boxes this year we’ve seen a lot more people expressing outrage or delight at the choices the managers’ AREN’T making as much as those they are.
Which can get pretty confusing. Too little Latin pop! Too MUCH afropop! Too Eurovision! Trying to be American! Novelty nonsense! Only the North Koreans sit serenely above this fray because nobody had any idea what to expect of them anyway.
As I said in a comment box this morning, the PWC asks a player to balance three things: their own music tastes, the music of the country they represent, and the preferences of the crowd. The precise weighting of these is what makes it tricky. But the tactics the players use point to more general issues around ‘pop’ and ‘world’ music. So let’s look at some of the strategies we’ve been seeing! more »
Tom in FT • 35 Comments
26 March 2010
I was lucky enough to attend a fascinating talk hosted by Mark Earls at the RSA last night on “cultural evolution” – using evolutionary theory to examine the mechanics of how stuff spreads through culture. I then came home and found a great Nitsuh Abebe post on my tumblr dashboard about music critic cliches – when and how they’re used.
The link between these two things? One of the most interesting parts of the talk was when Dr Alex Bentley of Durham university showed some analysis of the spread of “buzzwords” in academia – how particular language choices move through a population. He was looking at the change in use of words like “nuanced”, “apropos”, or “agency” as well as more obviously loaded terms like “Marxist” and words like “retarded” (which academics tend to use to mean ’slowed’). So of course I found this quite exciting, as it seems to me not wholly unlikely that the use of words like “ethereal” or “soundscape” might well spread in similar ways. more »
Tom in Proven By Science • 5 Comments
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Last week a question occurred to me: what interesting things can you find out by playing around with Last.FM listening data? Last.FM themselves offer a fair bit of extra analysis to users in their “Playground” section, but it’s all to do with individual listeners or their networks (or “neighbourhoods”). I wanted to see how much LFM data could tell us about specific artists, and how people listen to them.