How mainstream are you? - The Last.fm-Mainstream-O-Meter

You are 17.35 % Mainstream!

Crap! Looks like I am less alternative than I thought. 🙂

With the Last.fm-Mainstream-O-Meter, users of Last.fm (see “Discovering Music that You Like“) can see, how much their listening habits overlap with the evil mainstream. You only have to enter your Last.fm username and the webservice calculates – somehow – your mainstream factor in percent.

Unfortunately the Mainstream-O-Meter doesn’t explain exactly how this factor is calculated. The data which is shown along with the result makes me reason that it somehow compares the listener numbers of your personal top 15 with the numbers of the global top 10.

In this case, the rating would have a tendency towards mainstream, because it only takes the personal top 15 into consideration. Imagine someone who listens to a large number of different unknown bands, but each one not often. If he now listens to a few mainstream bands more often (but still less than to the huge number of unknown bands), his top15 will quickly be dominated by more mainstream bands.

On the other hand… this is just for fun, so who cares… 🙂

Update 23.11.2007

Unfortunately, the Last.fm-Mainstream-O-Meter has been shut down because it put too much load on its server. 🙁 It is yet unclear when it will be available again.

In the meantime, you might want to test the Last.fm Open Mind Index which is similar but different.

More Last.fm Tools

Some time ago, I created “Music Intersector“, a little tool which displays the musical intersections of two Last.FM accounts. Last.FM has now added a very similar feature themselves, but maybe someone is still interested.

Last.fm Normaliser (by Matt Perdeaux) creates charts that are ranked by the listening time instead of play counts.

Update 23.11.2007

More Last.fm Tools

Links