I’m admittedly a bit of an information junkie (perhaps to a fault). When I’m looking to buy my next unnecessary tech toy, splurge for a nice dinner out, or plan a trip, I spend countless hours doing research, whether it’s reading customer reviews, combing Youtube for video reviews, or lurking message boards to hear what people have to say. What can I say, I like making an informed decision. I’m generally not a math guy, but in general, I can’t get enough information and statistics. When my borderline-obsession with information collides with my biggest passion in life, music, it doesn’t get much better than Last.fm. I pour over my weekly stats, and am continually surprised at how my listening habits have changed over the years (the site has tracked nearly every song I’ve listened to since 2006). Although I’m no longer working with music on a day-to-day basis in the professional sense, I’m still very much interested in the industry, especially on the marketing side of things. As such, I’ve recently been thinking about Last.fm and how it could potentially be used by the bands and labels. I recently read a fantastic piece by Tom Ewing that discusses this in quite a bit of detail. There’s too much in his article for me to completely unpack and discuss right now, but check out the excerpts below. I also highly recommend reading the whole thing HERE

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And it’s this aspect that so excites the marketers and investors around Foursquare. A lot of clever people are talking about the “gameification of everyday life” right now– applications like Foursquare, which turn ordinary activities into something more gamelike. Turning music listening into a game is an obvious test case for this. Some have already tried– a service called thesixtyone.com launched last year, which, in amongst the sharing and voting, includes “quests” that work roughly like Foursquare badges. This may all sound fairly trivial, but it gets more interesting when the behavior change pieces start falling into place. I’ve designed small MP3-sharing games myself with the aim of discovering new music, but the scale of a successful social network turns it into something quite different. There’s already a bunch of anecdotal evidence that Foursquare alters the way its users pick places to hang out, which makes total sense. You can imagine it working in two directions: people defending Mayorships might vary their routines less than they otherwise would, as loyalty is a requirement of that imaginary office. But people chasing badges might be pushed into a more eclectic lifestyle, going to new places more often. So a “music foursquare” might offer a real opportunity to tweak the way people listen to music and push them in certain directions. Here we come to the nasty question lurking behind all talk of “liberal paternalism”– what is the “good” behavior we’d want to reward, and who gets to decide it? … Last.fm doesn’t do anything to emphasise the gamelike elements already present in its platform. Even if you put the hours in needed to become a “Top Listener” to a band– the closest thing it has to a badging mechanism– the information appears only erratically on their page, not on your own profile. And yet still there’s evidence that paying attention to your last.fm stats drives some kind of behavior change. The site publishes a monthly table of the songs most often deleted by users from their last.fm listening records, which depressingly for me is full of pop music I like but shows that users pay attention to what the site says about them. And it doesn’t take much to imagine that if people are weeding their last.fm gardens, they’re also seeding them, performing their tastes online under the real and imagined scrutiny of friends. Ever since I reviewed the Beatles reissues last year, that band has sat on top of my last.fm charts, and I admit I’ve felt a little annoyed and resentful about it– it’s probably led to my listening to less Beatles than I would have done. Which is ridiculous and sad, but I very much doubt I’m the only one letting last.fm sculpt my behavior like this. Source - Pitchfork

I think every marketer, be it of music or otherwise, wishes they could easily communicate with their “superfans”. The trendsetters and insiders. The people that proudly shout your name from the rooftops. I had the pleasure of working with many such people during my time at Atlantic, and it made my job 1,000 times easier. I’d love to see Last.fm partner with a band or label for contests, marketing campaigns, or just for the hell of it. Find a way to reward and encourage those that listen to your new album 100 times the week it comes out. Welcome new fans who have just listened to your music for the first time. Give a special shout-out to fans who have listened to your entire full discography in the past month. The possibilities are endless.