Fun Stuff > BAND

Although this place hates being like Pitchfork...

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KharBevNor:
I wasn't saying it in terms of share, but in terms of popularity. On a service which is obviously not going to have every Arcade Fire listener ever, or even close, there are 1,155,590 listeners. That's a whole city of Arcade Fire listeners. That's four times the population of Iceland.

They're a pretty big band.

E. Spaceman:
Though I mostly agree with Khar here, it does bear mention that an Arcade Fire fan is far more likely to have a last.fm than Dolly Parton fans.

elizaknowswhatshesfor:
I'd rather listen to Dolly Parton than Arcade Fire.

I may be wrong but recently magazines such as the NME & Kerrang or Metal Hammer even Rock Sound have failed to bring to light as many bands that aren't backed by huge PR machines. Which to me equates with being mainstream. But then I'm a dirty old DIY punk kid.*

I have said I don't read Pitchfork, but from that list I'm guessing the same is true. It's Pay to Play on paper/screen.

(*Who loves Dolly Parton.)

Johnny C:
Top 40 is a wayyyyy better metric of what's mainstream since it's largely based on sales and actual airplay, far more accurate than the nebulous "they get played on the radio." Arcade Fire are "indie huge" but that doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, and if you think the Antlers are remotely "big" you've got a completely warped sense of perspective - acts in the Top 40 have millions more sales and listeners, whether their Last.fm charts show it or not.

Also - and I wanna stress this for the next time it gets brought up - Last.fm is an awful, awful metric for a band's popularity. The last time I had this conversation, we looked at Broken Social Scene and Green Day. The former band has a third of the latter's listeners on last.fm, but the latter has several gold records and has sold somewhere in the neighbourhood of sixty or seventy million albums worldwide. Broken Social Scene don't even have a gold record in Canada. Last.fm is basically for people who care about Last.fm. It has no bearing on how popular an act actually is.

KharBevNor:
Over a million people listening to something anywhere is still crazy big though.

Also, a quick read of the Arcade Fire's wiki shows that Funeral is gold in several countries, including Canada, they've had top twenty singles in the UK, they've been on the cover of the Canadian edition of Time, MTV and NME named Funeral one of their top albums of the year, they've been on SNL...and it goes on. My suppositions are fairly good in this case, I think.

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