MIGHT CONCEIVABLY MAKE A GOOD RECORD BUT PROBABLY WON’T: One Direction.
MIGHT CONCEIVABLY MAKE A GREAT RECORD AS LONG AS WILL I AM KEEPS HIS GRUBBY PAWS OFF: Cher Lloyd
WILL MAKE A DISAPPOINTING BUT COMPETENT RECORD: Rebecca Ferguson
WILL MAKE […]

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 spe[…]

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 o[…]

I wrote a post before. in the “I Was A Goblin” series, about how the Dungeons & Dragons concept of player “levels” and “levelling up” was an innovation which became hardwired into pretty much every game since.[…]

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 &[…]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 t[…]

“No Parlez by Paul Young? Yes, I THINK I remember seeing one of those…”
New CDs for Old! Trigger pals The Hangover Lounge are hosting a “Music Swish” at the Lexington this Sunday – details here. The idea is that yo[…]