Idolator
Last.fm May Want To Recalibrate Their "Popular Tracks" List Next Year
The social-music site Last.fm—which allows users to track the music they listen to on their computers via a process called "scrobbling," and also has full-song streaming capabilities for certain tracks—released its "most listened to" list earlier this week. The artists list was topped by MGMT; the most-listened-to album was Coldplay's Viva La Vida; and perhaps owing directly to the previous two factors, the "best tracks" list had one surprise on it, and that was the fact that Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" snuck in between repeated spins of "Electric Feel," "Viva La Vida," and other MGMT and Coldplay songs.
THE GOOD: I forgot that Foals (No. 7 on artists) existed. I liked that album!
THE BAD: Raise your hands if you thought Does It Offend You, Yeah? would wind up on any year-end lists, even ones that probably overweigh albums that came out early in the year.
THE WHAAA? So yeah, it's kind of hilarious that last.fm chose to do an unweighted track list, because the repeated listens to both Viva and MGMT's Oracular Spectacular were so intense, the top 10 tracks list looks like this: Coldplay-Coldplay-MGMT-MGMT-Coldplay-Coldplay-Katy Perry-Coldplay-Coldplay-MGMT. (Actually, you could probably write some sort of song based around that structure, where "Coldplay" = a verse, "MGMT" = a chorus, and "Katy Perry" = a shrilly annoying bridge.) So how does a writer do up a kinda-boring list in a punchy enough way to make people continually click through its attached gallsticle? After the jump, we put Last.fm's writeups through the text-matrix site Wordle to see just what words stuck in writers' and editors' minds. ("WTF can't people just listen to something else" not included.)
Those of you who 
