Yeah, they might just go with lowest common denominators.
What sort of numbers were we expecting? I checked a group with 1500 members who I know have a lot of the same tastes and their top weekly artist had 330 plays. Another group with 41,000 members who I don't know anything about, their top artist was 4800 plays. We have 5 members so far with the top artist being 4 plays. I don't know what that means, just giving examples.
Here's what the FAQ says:
The way that overall charts work is that every “1†will represent a group member. For example, say there are 3 people in a group who listened to a certain artist in the last week, it’ll say “3†in the charts and this will mean that 3 members listened to that artist, and not the number of times that the artist was played by all group members.
The “unique to this group†charts which you can choose to view on a group’s page emphasise what is unique about the music taste of that group's members, compared to the listening habits of all other Last.fm users.
This means that these charts don’t just show you what a group’s members listen to like the overall group charts do, but what is special about their listening habits in comparison to what other users on Last.fm listen to (considering the average listener’s behaviour):
For example if the members of a group listen to artist A much more often than others do, artist A will be more unique to their group as this will be special to their listening habits, compared to everyone else’s; if they listen to Artist B, but everyone else also listens to artist B a lot, then this will be less special and artist B will be less unique to their group.
Like most reading material I get, this is taking a minute to sink in.
But I think I got it. So, who is the one group member to hold out on Evanescence and Coldplay this week? I know it wasn't me!
And clicking on the unique thing gives us no actual numbers yet, but I don't doubt the artists listed make our charts unique. There's Christian music, indie acts like CITA and Caleb, then more 90's stuff like Eiffel65. This is so neat, I never would have thought up things like this.
*E*