With the nominees for the Mercury Music Prize 2013 announced yesterday, I decided to compile snapshots of the listening trends data displayed on Last.fm for all of the nominated albums. Last.fm (the company I work for) is a music discovery service which allows people to keep a record of every track they listen to on their computer, mobile device, or mp3 player, as well as supported music services like Spotify and This is My Jam. Last.fm then aggregates this data to compile weekly charts based on what people actually listen to around the world.
These snapshots show the number of registered Last.fm users listening to the nominated albums per week, for the last 6 months. Also displayed is the total number of plays (called scrobbles) and total number of unique listeners. Although the Mercury Prize is decided by a panel of judges, I personally think it’s interesting to follow the relative popularity of each album, and speculate on whether that has any impact on the decision.
I leave the interpretation of the data to you.
Arctic Monkeys – AM (6 September 2013)
David Bowie – The Next Day (8 March 2013)
Disclosure – Settle (31 May 2013)
Foals – Holy Fire (11 February 2013)
Jake Bugg – Jake Bugg (15 October 2012)
James Blake – Overgrown (5 April 2013)
Jon Hopkins – Immunity (June 4, 2013)
Laura Marling – Once I Was An Eagle (27 May 2013)
Laura Mvula- Sing to the Moon (1 March 2013)
Rudimental – Home (29 April 2013) (also see the deluxe edition )
Savages – Silence Yourself (May 6, 2013)
Villagers – {Awayland} (January 11, 2013)
Jon Hallier - Maddieman Games 