Polling Without Context

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

[Poll #1018696]

Comments

[cis.livejournal.com]

What do you think last.fm is representative of, if anything?

mIddle-class american teens and early-twentysomethings! computer literate, college-educated (or about to be), predominately white and white-collar (in attitude if not in actual job). Clearly they do a lot of listening at their computers, so either they're working with computers or they spend a lot of wind-down time on a computer, probably doing some kind of 'social networking' and probably not playing MMORPGs or other computer games because those have their own soundtracks, don't they? I was going to define them as 'facebook-users', rather than 'myspace-users' or 'lj-users', but actually using last.fm implies slightly more of an early-adopter mentality than using facebook. People confident in their tastes as a social identifier: you don't get a last.fm unless you think people will positively react to what you're listening to, and getting a last.fm implies that your public identity is tied up in what music you associate yourself with.

[cis.livejournal.com]

by 'working with computers' obv I mean 'doing office work or writing papers or whatever it is the students do', rather than 'being sysadmins or the like'. Basically I think these people are... the 'mode' (as in 'average') of current internet user.

Am I stereotyping dreadfully here?

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

No, I think you are pretty much bang on. Much more so than the Lex, anyway: these people aren't really music geeks, at least not to the extent that yr average poptimist-poster is.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

They're a subset of "regular music users" - they're into music to the extent that they'll sign up to last.fm and then leave it on their PCs. (which is quite a large extent).

The question is - how big a subset are they? I DON'T think they're the 'mode' current internet user - the m.c.i.u. is certainly older than this suggests. Unlike some other social networking things I don't get the sense last.FM has much penetration in the 30something and up market.

[cis.livejournal.com]

yeah, you're probably right - my internet use is very skewed toward twentysomething lifestyle, so much so that I don't really remember about the rest of the internet.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

they're into music to the extent that they'll sign up to last.fm and then leave it on their PCs. (which is quite a large extent).

Is it though? It takes under a minute and you never have to do anything with it again - I was just thinking "I should put it on my work PC" and I looked at the task bar, and there it is, scrobbling away.

I don't neccesarily agree it's a "fear my mighty music taste" thing either - several of my friends use it as an internet radio station that plays the kind of stuff that their friends who are really into music like.

[ms-bracken.livejournal.com]

"by 'working with computers' obv I mean 'doing office work or writing papers or whatever it is the students do', rather than 'being sysadmins or the like'."

Actually, if they're in a job they're possibly likely to lean to the technical side -as you need to install something to make it work and most workplaces don't give you install rights as standard for presumably excellent reasons...

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

No, I think you're in the right direction, though I'd suspect that they're likely to be even more casual, both as regards music and computers: last.fm basically comes in capsule form these days, and of the six iTunes libraries I can see on the local network, three of them are from people that I'd bet have never opened a music magazine in their lives.