I am a big fan of Last.fm. It has introduced me to music that I would not otherwise have come across and it has basically replaced all but Radio 3 in terms of music stations for me.

While listening to it the other day my eye was caught by two statistics which Last.fm gives you about artists – the number of listeners and the number of tracks played. So Pylon who are playing in the background at the moment have 117,314 plays from 10,673 listeners, giving a ratio of nearly 11 plays per listener. This got me wondering about how this compared to the wider world. 

Obviously the baseline is a  band which has just one play and one listener. Hmm, I think I might have seen them supporting Boots for Dancing. So the lowest you can go is 1.

Now you could have an obsessional fan who only plays ooh The Prats and does so day in, day out so you could get a very high ratio without it meaning anything so there should be a landscape where you want a high ratio but not too high, lots of plays and lots of listeners.

So what does my world look like?

So apart from Ferenc they all sit between 10 and 20.

But what about “popular” bands, what do they look like?

Well Coldplay have a ratio of 48.80, Girls Aloud 23.74 and The Killers 40.98. So does this mean that Mark does not like any music which scores over 20? Well Interpol hit 41.42 so nope.

So does this mean anything or is it just an exercise in stats? No idea, just a way to kickstart my brain this fine new year.

Oh and The Prats? 3.62.