Being the Last.fm scrobble freak that I am, I used my web based stats page to check my scrobble count and started clicking through my friends’ stats.

I eventually came across one that caught my attention.

He’s been a member since 2007 and has scrobbled 1 song..and he is a paying subscriber. I thought to myself, what a waste of money! …so I clicked on his Last.fm page.

You’ll have to open these images to see the details, but basically what you’ll see is that my math skills are apparently either ridiculously awesome or Last.fm’s are very poor.

Play counts are based on the total number of tracks scrobbled divided by the length of the membership in days. This seems obvious enough doesn’t it? Well, my calculations show that 1 song in 1180 days is somewhere around 0.000847 plays per day…which is far from the 12,920 plays per day that Last.fm seems to think.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is just really poor programming to make such inaccurate calculations?

In case you’re wondering, the “589 more plays needed” tidbit means that if he had (by the end of the day) 590 plays in total that his average daily play count would be 0.5…which Last.fm rounds up to 1 per day.

Even considering the account had been reset, should they not be able to correctly calculate track plays? Maybe their servers are just having a few hiccups, but either way I thought it was funny enough for a post.

Also, if you don’t understand the joke in the title then you’re really missing out on an old clip about Maths! You should take a quick moment to have your daily laugh.