As for Angra, I would assume that their South American fanbase is not represented well at all due to a lack of internet connectivity or perhaps Myspace is not a popular tool there as well?
Yeah, the Brazilians are crazy about Orkut (
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-brazil-loves-orkut/3082/) so they probably don't do myspace as much.
The fact that Nighwish's numbers are double Maiden's, tells you all you need to know about the value of that data. There isn't a single place on Earth, where Nightwish would outdraw Maiden, including Tuomas' living room.
That's probably true, but the data still gives you some interesting information about how the two bands are regarded within a particular demographic. Their last.fm numbers are also interesting to compare: Nightwish has 19,310,130 plays/292,101 listeners, while Maiden has 20,455,222/354,147, which shows that Nightwish (unsurprisingly) has somewhat more "dedicated" fans than Iron Maiden, but also that last.fm users swing more towards Iron Maiden a bit more than myspace users.
The date the band's MySpace page went online is a huge variable?
Yeah, that's why a Myspace-views-in-the-last-month and Last.fm-listens-in-the-last-month (or six months, week, whatever) would be nice. Last.fm's numbers should be a lot less affected by this (the band's page automatically appears whenever the band begins), but it would still be nice to know "Are all these people listening to this band *right now*, or were they popular three years ago and now they're on the wane?"
All of that data is fairly invalid as l see it. Dream Theater's numbers are triple Queensryche's, but l'm sure QR either outdraws DT or it would be fairly even at any venue. On the co-headlining tour they did...l was at 3 shows & the crowd was fairly even...with the edge given to QR if there was any.
Last.fm is even worse for Queensryche: 14,435,264/236,695 for Dream Theater, vs. 1,925,865/84,868 for Queensryche. Surprised me a bit too, but at some point I think you just have to accept that even if those numbers aren't quite right, your preconceived notion (that was based on little beyond a view of who a crowd was "for") may not be right either. It sort of makes sense, if you realize that lots of people really liked Queensryche 20 years ago, but we're talking about today. I know *I* really like Queensryche, but I still hardly ever listen to their albums anymore, and I haven't made a point to go see them recently.
Furthermore, on Queensryche's Top Tracks in the Last Six Months list, you have to drop all the way to #26 to get to a post-Empire song ("Bridge"), while Dream Theater has songs from their new album mixed in right at the top along with the "Pull Me Under"s and such.
Basically the numbers don't really mean anything. Myspace is full of kids who add anyone and everyone to make their own friends list look large, adding bands is an easy way of doing this.
But don't you think such activity would basically even out across all bands in the list? We're only concerned with the relative numbers here, after all.
And while the numbers probably aren't useful in a court of law, and you don't want to be making huge wagers based solely on them, it's silly to say that they don't really mean anything. At the very least, they show how many profile views a band has gotten on myspace, and that's useful information right there.
Neil
heheheh