Valentine’s Day Infographic on last.fm

Valentne's Day logo for Last.fm
Valentine's Day Music Infographic for Last.fm - CITY. MUSIC. SEX. ROMANCE.

“We don’t have the time for psychological romance”
– Larry Blackmon, Cameo

As my missus will testify, I’m not very romantic and greetings cards make me nauseous. So I wasn’t looking forward to designing a feature for Valentine’s Day.

Then I realised it might be interesting to use music data to see if anyone else felt the same or if Valentine’s day was full of hopeless romantics playing “Somebody To Love” by Jefferson Airplane back-to-back like saps.

So I went to see Omar…

Omar the Oracle

I don’t pretend to understand what Omar does, I like to think his job involves “running things through the computer”. He is always very patient with me, even when I ask him silly questions like: “Do you think David Hasselhoff’s audience was affected by the drunken cheeseburger + floor-as-plate incident?” (it did, the Hoff gained an extra 400 scrobbles that week). Omar was more than happy to dig into the Valentine’s Day stats, especially when I said I wanted to compare the music tags “romantic” with “sex”. I’m always running the word “sex” through the computer and it never takes long.

To get a clean set of Valentine’s data to analyse, Omar compared the listening behaviour on 14 Feb over a number of years to the behaviour on any other day of the year, normalised it to remove erroneous “new release” spikes, thereby sifting out the tracks unique to Valentine’s Day. Then we went to work with the location and genre tags.

This gave us a list of cities ranked from Sexy to Romantic and the proportion of sexiness for each.

Looks like I need to head to Fresno on 14 Feb!

See the full feature on last.fm