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[…]

(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’[…]

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 tonigh[…]

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 ru[…]

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 […]

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 […]

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[…]

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 […]

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[…]