I Am Very Tall

I've been looking into some of the third-party uses of last.fm data. Some of the stuff is pretty cool. For instance, there are two online tools measuring diversity of taste. By both metrics, I'm not super-boring, but I'm not pushing any envelopes either. Here's a quick synopsis:

Range of musical artists:
I thought this was pretty cool. The actual test comes in two flavors, the standard eclectic and the super eclectic. This test looks at the first 5 (or 20) artists associated with artists in your Top 20 (or Top 50). The diversity of your tastes is then calculated as a percentage of the possible maximum (100 or 1000). I came up with a score of 468/1000. You can see how that stacks up to everyone else on last.fm in the following chart.

As I said, not impressive, but not shabby either.

AEP (Anti-Exponential Points):
This metric essentially looks at the number of plays your most favored artist gets vs. the number of plays of your 50th most favored artist. The underlying math looks a little stupid to me, but it does look at something that the previous metric avoids, namely the degree of concentration in the top tier. Anyway, I submitted myself to the test and got a 3.69/5, which again means I'm not super diverse, but I don't suck either. Unfortunately, these guys didn't put together a neat little histogram of their distributions.

There is, however, a group of high-scoring and low-scoring people. Both of them (and particularly the high-scoring set) seem to do nothing but listen to Radiohead all the time.