Domingo 24 Fev 2008, 7h:43

There is no universally accepted way to find out whether your musical taste is eclectic or not. But there are plenty of "Eclecto-meters", that have been made around Last.FM.

Here I test out a couple of them. I consider my musical taste to be pretty eclectic, as I like to listen to different kinds of music.

So here goes:

The first test is the AEP Calculator by davethemoonman. According to him, it works in the following way:

AEP is a measure of how diverse your music tastes are, based on the top 50 artists in your Last.fm profile. It was invented by C26000 and you can find full details about how it is computed here. AEP is a number, usually below 5. Roughly speaking, if it is greater than 4 you have very diverse taste in music, if it greater than 3 then you have fairly diverse taste in music. At the other end of the scale, if it is less that 0, you are probably an obsessive fan of your top artist. If it less than -10, you are probably a fake top fan. Depending on which end of the scale you are, you can join either the We Don't Have Exponential Profiles or the We Have Exponential Profiles group.

The score calculates how much of the music you listen to is only few artists, if that makes sense… :) So, my score ain't that high, since even though I listen to different kinds of music, I listen mostly to only some of the artists.

The second test is Anthony Liekens's Eclectic Test. It works as follows:

The following script takes the 20 top artists in your musical profile from Last.fm, and finds the collection of top 5 similar artists for this top 20. The resulting is a list of artists similar to your preferred artists. As the list is larger (maximum = 100), your musical preference is more diverse.

My eclectic score is currently

94/100

The 94 related artists for my profile are A Perfect Circle, After Forever, Aine, Alice in Chains, Anathema, Audioslave, Autechre, Avril Lavigne, Biosphere, Black Sabbath, Bob Dylan, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Britney Spears, Counting Crows, Creamstar, David Bowie, Deep Purple, Deftones, Dido, Disturbed, Don Huonot, Eagles, Enigma, Entheogenic, Foo Fighters, Giant Sand, Global Communication, Incubus, Iron & Wine, Iron Maiden, Ismo Alanko, Ismo Alanko Säätiö, Jewel, Jon & Vangelis, Kaddisfly, Kelly Clarkson, Kiss, Kiss the Blade, KoЯn, Lacuna Coil, Madonna, Maija Vilkkumaa, Maj Karma, Megadeth, Mike Oldfield, Monolake, Mötley Crüe, Natalie Imbruglia, Neil Young, Neko Case, Neljä Ruusua, Nine Inch Nails, Northcape, Oceansize, Orbital, Ott, Ozzy Osbourne, Pantera, Pixies, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Slayer, Slipknot, Soundgarden, Spacetime Continuum, Steve Roach, Sugababes, Tangerine Dream, Tehosekoitin, The Future Sound of London (2), The Mars Volta, The Offspring, The Orb (3), The Saints of Eden, The Smashing Pumpkins, The White Stripes, Theatre of Tragedy, Tool (2), Tristania, Tuvalu, U2 (2), Van Morrison, Vangelis, Whitesnake, Wilco, YUP, Zen Café (2), Би-2, Мара, Мумий Тролль, Ночные Снайперы, Сплин

So, here I scored a lot more points than in the previous test. I think that this one mirrors the way I think about eclecticism more than the first one. (And it's always nice to score high on a test, isn't it? :))

I bet there are dozens of tests similar to this all over last.fm and the net, with slightly differing ways of calculating your eclectic ways… Just be sure that the calculation has a similar notion of eclecticism as you do!