How mainstream am I?

There's a meme thingie going around users at Last.fm at the moment whereby they calculate how 'mainstream' their music taste is by adding up the number of listeners for each of their top ten artists and then dividing the mean average by the number of Radiohead listeners (the most listened to artist on Last.fm).

As it is Sunday, the day of rest and procrastination, I decided to work out how mainstream I am. Here are my Top Ten Artists and the number of listeners for each on Last.fm:

• Orbital - 66,286
• Depeche Mode - 178,991
• The Orb - 33,841
• Xploding Plastix - 10,428
• LFO - 23,493
• Red Snapper - 18,749
• DJ Shadow - 98,026
• Four Tet - 55,873
• Aphex Twin - 122,145
• David Bowie - 229,893

The mean average of those figures comes out as 83,772.5 and the current number of listeners of Radiohead on Last.fm is 323,179, therefore my mainstream score works out as:

• 83,772.5 ÷ 323,179 = 25.92%

Quite low but not painfully obscure.

Then I wondered if Bowie and Depeche Mode, atypically popular artists compared to much of the stuff I normally listen to, were artificially lifting my mainstream score; so I decided to include the next ten most popular artists from my Last.fm chart in my calculation:

• Boards Of Canada - 101,766
• Pixies - 204,143
• RJD2 - 60,292
• Prefuse 73 - 59,250
• Mouse On Mars - 30,560
• Bola - 12,468
• Laurent Garnier - 18,876
• Plaid - 32,357
• Blockhead - 14,417
• Underworld - 72,753

This gives me a mean average of 72,230.35, so:

• 72,230.35 ÷ 323,179 = 22.35%

A slight drop but not much.

In conclusion, my music taste is not mainstream but neither do I embrace horribly pretentious, whacked out, totally unlistenable avant-garde noisescapes. Of course, this calculation is complete bollocks but working it out was an amusing diversion on a Sunday afternoon.