Boys like Metallica, girls like Lady Gaga, and other fun Last.fm facts

An intern at Last.fm has come up with a fun tool for analysing your music taste. Gender Plot compares your taste to the rest of the service’s userbase, letting you see just how “Manly” or “Girly” your music taste is, as well as whether the bands you like fit your current age.

Writing on the Last.fm blog, Joachim Van Herwegen explains:

“I wanted to explore Last.fm’s data to learn how listening preferences vary with the listener’s age and gender. Apart from the science, the most important thing I found is that you can make awesome plots with this information.

“I started by making a chart to show what kind of music you “should” be listening to if you really want to fit in with the most common artists in your age range and gender.”

This revealed that, for example, men in their 20s appear to listen to a lot of metal acts like Slayer and Metallica while women of the same age tend to prefer pop acts like Lady Gaga and the cast of Glee. Switching to look at music tags, Van Herwegen found that other “manly” genres include Math Rock and Jazz Fusion, while for women it’s Power Pop and Anti-folk.

It’s interesting to see how this data conforms to stereotypes of what it generally thought of as masuline and feminine.

If you want to see how your own taste compares to other Last.fm users, the good news is that there’s a tool allowing you to do just that in the Last.fm Playground. You can even compare your taste to your friends and print out a PDF chart that shows just who conforms to gender and age stereotypes the most.

So, I apparently have the music taste of a 25 year-old (despite being 31 – neat!), balanced equally between male and female average taste, as you can see by the red dot in the image below. The most ‘manly’ audio I listen to is satirist Chris Morris’ old radio shows, while I show my girly side by listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Try it for yourself here.