Looking at song popularity
While digging around the CBC R3Labs data, a question came up - What does it mean for a track to be “popular” on R3?
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to find the number of times the top 10% or 20% of tracks are played, but we also thought it would be interesting to compare some of this “popularity” data from the R3 website with that of music site last.fm. We found the comparison to be actually quite interesting, in a geeky/push-the-glasses-back-up-on-nose kinda way.
We looked at plays of the top 100 tracks on both services for a given week, and found that “popularity” is noticeably skewed towards the mega hits on last.fm, in comparison to R3. For example, the most popular track on last.fm accounts for well over twice as many of top 100 plays as its R3 counterpart. Also, the top 20 tracks on last.fm account for almost 40% of the plays of the top 100 songs. This is in contrast to less then 30% for the top 20 on R3. Check out the chart below to see the differences.
While we don’t pretend to know all the reasons for the difference in the popularity curves between these two services, it’s certainly fun to speculate! Perhaps CBC R3 visitors are more exploratory then last.fm users, often venturing out past the obvious tracks on the website. Or maybe Canadian audiences are not as influenced by the massive music marketing machine as the predominately US based last.fm audience. In a perfect world, I would like to imagine that Canada’s history of providing recording and tour grants for artists has helped fuel both the creation of this large back catalog of interesting music, while at the same time, helping build demand.
What do you think is behind difference in “popularity” between R3 and last.fm?
(This is a repost from the R3Labs blog over at CBC R3)