The Passion Index
One of the ways that Music 2.0 has changed how we think about music is that there is so much interesting data available about how people are listening to music…
Computing listening data is the future of the music industry. Sadly. How will this guide future music creation?
The “passion index” is interesting but it’s kind of glaring that pretty much all the “popular acts who do badly” are those who also have one single big hit that outweighs the others.
So it’s as much a “consistency index”, i.e. people are likely to sit down and listen to a whole Beatles album through (and rack up 14 plays) but their Soft Cell listening amounts to “Tainted Love” on a compilation (hence only a single play, and a lower passion index). They might very well think “Tainted Love” is as awesome as any given Beatles song though!
I find this interesting. I hope music doesn’t become like Baseball where we can disect ever little statistic (I’m looking at you pan-skynet-dora).
