We are having our first ever Readers Poll this year! It’s only going to be a little poll, with just one category – the best tracks of the last year. If you’re reading this, and especially if you’re a regular reader or commenter, we’d love you to take part.
All you need to do is send an email with your 20 favourite tracks of 2010, in order, to poppoll2010@gmail.com. And you should do this before the end of Sunday 2nd January 2011, so we can run the results on the week of the 3rd. That’s it really! But there are a few clarifications below the cut anyway. more »
On New Years’ Eve 1989, I didn’t go to a party. I didn’t wish anyone a happy new decade. I don’t think I drank any champagne. I stayed at home and watched TV instead, and it was wonderful.
What I stayed home to watch was a special highlights show on the music of the 80s, put together (so Alan tells me) by the Late Review team and shown on BBC2 across midnight. (A Big Ben graphic pops up during a Dead Or Alive performance, discreetly welcoming in 1990). The show had no presenters – it was simply a patchwork of clips, a minute or so long each, vaguely themed (sometimes VERY vaguely) in sections. It started with Hayzi Fantayzee, at the top of a one-hit wonders bit, and ended with the artist of the decade: Prince. In between was almost anybody I remembered and a lot more I didn’t. Here’s the section called “Barking” – essentially, acts who were a bit ‘eccentric’.
Today’s Guardian column is about song titles, and specifically how the titles on the new Gold Panda album work. Actually it was originally going to be more about the titles and less about the Panda, but in the end the specifics took the piece over – and that’s for the best: who wants to read me wittering on about titling strategy when they could be hearing about a really good new record?
A couple of Fridays ago I set a simple quiz for FT readers – name the most-played Last.FM tracks of these 20 acts. 13 people replied, and here are the answers!
MGMT: The answer is “Kids”. 9 out of 13 people got this, the rest said “Time To Pretend” (#2). Not a bad start!
Lady Gaga: The answer is “Poker Face”. 6 people got this. Other choices were “Bad Romance” (which HAS now topped it but at the time of the update was #2), “Alejandro” (#4), “Just Dance” (#6) and “Telephone” (down at #20, an obvious victim of the ‘featuring’ curse) more »
Since January I’ve been doing a column in the Guardian every fortnight. These are written for a slightly different audience than my loveable pop-crazy readers here, and it’s also the first time I’ve written regularly for print (web to print is a much bigger shift than unedited to edited, by the way). Even so I thought it might be nice for FT readers who like my stuff to get access to all of them – and frankly it’s useful for me having links in one place too.
The remit of the column is that I’m meant to be jumping off from something that’s happening now – sometimes this is more central to the piece than others.
In part 1 of this series looking at artist metrics on Last.FM, I talked about PPL (Plays Per Listener) and also the relative popularity of each act’s top track.
In this part we dig a little bit deeper into an artist’s catalogue, with two more metrics based on their list of top tracks (which, remember, are the tracks with most listeners over the last six months, not over the whole of LFM’s history). I’m calling these metrics – rather unimaginatively – head and body. “Head” is the number of listeners to the tenth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the first. “Body” is the number of listeners to the fiftieth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the tenth.
Both of these are based on the same principle – ratios of popular and less popular songs in an artist’s catalogue – but they turn out to measure quite different things. Head measures the extent to which an act is a several-hit wonder. A high head means that your top track isn’t that much more popular than your tenth, which usually means you’ve racked up either a bunch of successful singles or have at least one album that people are keen to listen to in toto. A low head means that you have a few, or maybe just one track which people are particularly keen on but that interest doesn’t extend very far – it suggests a big chunk of casual listeners in your audience. more »
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.
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 »
(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 »
We are having our first ever Readers Poll this year! It’s only going to be a little poll, with just one category – the best tracks of the last year. If you’re reading this, and especially if you’re a regular reader or commenter, we’d love you to take part.
