Last.fm Open Mind Index – How open are you to different styles of music?


The list of Last.fm extensions is still expanding. 🙂 Today: The Last.fm Open Mind Index

With this tool, you can calculate your personal Open Mind Index (OMI). The OMI is intended to reflect the bandwidth or your personal musical taste. The higher the number, the broader is your taste in music and the more open you are to different styles of music.

The calculation is based on your Last.fm profile, the top 50 artists of the last 12 months to be exact. OMI uses the play count and the tags that have been added to the artists. Analyzing the number, distribution and weight of the tags, the index number is created.

Last.fm Open Mind Index reminds me a little of the Mainstream-O-Meter – but I score better at OMI. 🙂 An OMI over 150 stands for “an extremely high bandwidth of musical styles, an absolute freethinker and Freak Wink”. 🙂

It’s also fun to see what tags appear in your personal musical taste. In my profile, for example, I discovered “apocalyptic folk” (0,21%) and “gothabilly” (0,11%). ^_^

Also fun are the statistics over the entirety of OMI users. Most open are users who listen to “experimental”, “psychedelic” or “comedy”. Least open seem to be listeners of “Grunge”, “visual kei” and “j-pop”. The most open country is Puerto Rico and the most static is Saudi Arabia.

The graphics of your personal bandwidth, which the Open Mind Index generator creates can be embedded into ones Last.fm profile, or elsewhere (like for example here).

Unfortunately, the website of Open Mind Index seems to be in German only. Maybe it switches to English if a user with a non-german IP visits, but I doubt it. Fortunately, it is easy to use just enter your Last.fm username in the only input field and push the button. 🙂 If you have any trouble, ask in the comments, so I can translate a bit more.

» The Last.fm Open Mind Index

Like all Last.fm toys the usual disclaimer applies: An exact survey would look different. For example, the musical styles are generated from the tags which are given by other users. This alone can cause much distortion in the results. Maybe some musical styles just have a broader spectrum of tags than others. But as usual, this does not matter, because this is for fun, isn’t it? 🙂

More Last.fm toys

(via Kreativrauschen.de)

2 replies on “Last.fm Open Mind Index – How open are you to different styles of music?”

Hi,

Thanks for blogging about this fascinating tool. I was able to get my open mind index map but I can’t seem to figure out how to integrate it in my last.fm profile. I am wondering if you could perhaps help out? Thanks!

Cheers,
TP

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