Last.fm’s ‘Most Listened to Arists of 2011′ list yields surprising results
The world’s biggest music-based social network Last.fm has just released its annual list the most listened to artists of the past year, and some of the results are quite surprising.
Naturally, first place was a no-brainer, with Adele storming in as 2011′s most scrobbled artist by a mile (which ranks by the number of individual listeners, not overall plays/scrobbles). Adele almost doubled the listeners of her nearest competition, Lady GaGa, with 818,395 listeners to GaGa’s 460,356.
The big shock comes from Cherrytree songstress Natalia Kills, who crashes in at an impressive No. 5 with 372,846 listeners. Unlike the rest of the artists in the top 10 –which includes the likes of Britney Spears, Foster The People, Radiohead, Avril Lavigne, and Foo Fighters– Kills was the only one who hasn’t made it big in the States yet — she has yet to crack the Hot 100, and her debut album Perfectionist debuted at No. 134 on the Billboard 200. Kills’ success has been predominantly in Australia and Germany, where her songs “Mirrors” and “Free” were both hits. Her No. 5 entry into Last.fm’s most listened list shows that she’s gaining quite a large fanbase, or at least, stirring up enough interest to make people check out her tunes.
Elsewhere, Beyonce clunked in at No. 18, which was to be expected given that her last album 4 didn’t produce any hits whatsoever. Britney Spears on the other hand came in at No. 4, which was a strong reflection of the success she’s had on the singles-front over the past year, with tunes like “I Wanna Go” and “Till The World Ends” smashing the charts worldwide.
Even worse than Beyonce is Rihanna, who came in at No. 51 after having reached No. 8 the previous year. The drop indicates that most the people listening to Rihanna’s music in the past year were already familiar with the diva’s tunes, rather than new listeners jumping on board. It’s not a huge shock, given that Last.fm is a UK-based service with a big percentage of homegrown users, and the UK is close-to being Rihanna’s biggest market.
But yeah, I’m really only here for Natalia Kills at No. 5. You bitches now need to start actually buying her music instead of just scrobbling it!
