Now that you and Tool are both on Spotify, here's a fun website to play with - also, some observations on Tool and Spotify's popularity metrics

There's a website I like to check in on now and again - obscurifymusic.com - you log into it with your Spotify account and it runs analytics on your listening habits, including top genres, favorite tracks, how happy or upbeat (or not) your music is, etc. You can also see your top listened-to artists and songs from all time and from the last few weeks. It also gives you an "obscurity score." Counter-intuitively, the lower it is, the more obscure your listening habits.

So, after a week and a half of Tool on Spotify, here are a few things I observed checking in now:

First, its top genre categories are a bit wonky. Another site, everynoise.com, gives you genre categories using the same data that Spotify uses. According to everynoise, Tool counts as " alternative metal, nu metal, post-metal, post-grunge, progressive rock, alternative rock, rock, progressive metal, art rock." I question "nu metal," "rock" is uselessly broad (a category that includes both Tool and Kenny Loggins is of inherently limited utility), and I'm not even sure what "post-grunge" means, especially since it includes Nirvana, which seems to me a little like calling the Ramones "post-punk" but whatevs. The rest of the categories seem fine to me. At any rate, if any of those are in your top genres, Tool might have helped that genre spiral out to the top of your list, so, keep going.

Now for the fun part - "obscurity." If you look down your list of most listened-to songs and/or artists, you'll see stars - between 0-5. That tells you very roughly how listened-to (on Spotify specifically) that artist or song is. Five stars and we can't avoid you if we want to, one and only relevant genre aficionados know who you are, zero and you're that weird Slovenian trip-hop group with <300 listeners I keep pushing on people. So, where does Tool fall?

It's kind of hard to tell from my list, so I'm kind of curious to see what comparisons other people find, but, looking down my lists, Eminem and Billie Eilish both got five stars and that's it. (I have a really low "obscurity score.")

Tool gets four stars. For a basis of comparison, the only artists I' finding on my lists who also have four stars are Nirvana, Tyler the Creator, Lana Del Rey, and the fucking Beatles. (Note, this is why it's particular to Spotify - more recent releases are, naturally, way more listened to on Spotify at the height of their popularity.)

So far, in two and a half weeks, our friends have leapfrogged the following three-star popularity acts: Massive Attack, Pixies, The Cure, Soundgarden, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails. Everything else here is two stars or less.

As far as individual songs go, "Fear Innoculum" gets three stars. That puts it in the same popularity rating as Tupac's "Hit 'Em Up," Lana Del Rey's "Doin' Time," and, apparently I'm going to need other people to help out with examples here. "Rosetta Stoned" gets two, tying it with FKA twigs's "Cellophane," Hole's "Violet," and Goldfrapp's "Strict Machine."

And those are the only Tool songs currently in my recent top 50, but I'm kind of curious what observations other people would like to make about their analytics and the band's place in them after a whopping two and a half weeks.

Submitted August 20, 2019 at 05:55PM by Aiden_Fox https://ift.tt/2Z8a0yA