15 Oct 2007 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Entertainment

Radiohead trounce allcomers on Last.fm

I think it’s a fairly safe generalisation to make that the millions of people signed up to Last.fm conform to a certain stereotype, in terms of musical tastes. In fact, the main surprise to me is the semi-permanent position of The Beatles at number one. Radiohead are usually in the top three or four bands, but naturally with a new album out last week, I expected them to challenge the fab four’s supremacy. I didn’t expect this (above). That’s a lot of people listening to a new album, especially one released in such an unconventional format. My calculator also suggests that the average Last.fm listener who listened to Radiohead last week played an average 28 tracks from the band, which – given the long tail of listeners on permanent iTunes library shuffle mode who will have only played one or two old tracks – means that a lot of people played the new album many, many times over. This guy listened to 1,994 Radiohead tracks in a week. And the fact that the number of plays of each track seems to be the album in order suggests that people are listening to it exactly in the order it was presented (everyone has to bail out of a listening sometime).

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