David at  Digital Audio Insider wrote a neat post earlier this week:

I thought it’d be fun to use Last.fm statistics to try to devise a measure of “audience devotion.” Using the most popular act in the Last.fm database (The Beatles) as a comparison point, I looked up the total number of listeners and the total number of plays for 49 other acts. They include some of the biggest names in “indie” rock, some fairly unknown local acts, and a few various names from my iTunes library. I divided the number of plays for each artist by the total number of listeners to create a “plays-per-listener” ratio and then ranked the spreadsheet by that number.

I’ve found Last.fm fun for tracking the rise of some bands (why I remember the days when the now-ubiquitous Peter, Bjorn and John just barely topped 1,000 total listeners, for instance), but this is a particularly clever approach. It’d be fascinating to track these bands over time and see if he’s right in his predictions about who will last and who will crash.