You know how some songs will always remind you of specific times or places? Viva La Vida is the song that puts me right back in the hospital the day after my twins were born. Hearing that song makes me remember the amazing and very new time when Matthew was with me and my wife, yet Sarah was still in the special care nursery, fighting to keep up her weight and keep up her temperature. While my wife was recuperating, and Matthew was sleeping, I was listening to Coldplay, and that song is now hard-wired for me. A great group, great album, great song, and great memory. - Louis Gray from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Louis, what a great memory indeed! It's a beautiful thing when music can evoke a happy time in one's life. Warren, I had no idea "head of the long tail" was a current buzzword(s). What I meant was precisely what the Long Tail theory describes -- there is a small percentage of data that gets the majority of attention. The head, if you will. - Richard from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Just for the record, I do like Coldplay too. I haven't listened to the latest album tho, but I like their older stuff. In terms of it being no surprise Coldplay dominates the tracks list, I agree. It's just as much a mainstream chart as Billboard, which was one of the points of my headline :-) What would be really interesting is to find out what are the top 10 tracks from people who have similar music tastes to mine - e.g. fellow Nirvana fans, what do they regard as their top 10s. Some kind of aggregation system which shows e.g. "Top 10 Tracks of Nirvana Fans" would be real interesting to me. Hopefully last.fm can do this kind of thing in future. - Richard from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Suprising they not have an API for this very sort of thing? I guess they see the results as a saleable commodity in terms of advertisers and music companies alike. - thomasrdotorg