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[…]

(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’[…]

Nigeria 3 Germany 1
The Pop City Stadium in Johannesburg is awash in white and green tickertape; the team jog around the perimeter bearing manager Matt DC aloft upon their shoulders; a continent rejoices as for the first time an African nation has wo[…]

As anticipation begins to build for the football world cup, the pop version approaches its climax. Thirty-two teams arrived in South Africa: only four remain. We’ll be bringing you the semi-finals next week – let’s have a look at th[…]