measuring stick

i figured out a rough way of gauging the relative popularity of musical acts, and i'm not sure why it didn't occur to me before. this past week, i logged in to one of those streaming music sites. it had been a long time since my last visit, and they had recently redone their site. handily, each artist that plays now shows up alongside several other similar artists, with the number of listeners and total streams for each. using this metric, i first discovered that norfolk & western are way too obscure. i'm not sure what the deal is; little wings has a lot more listeners and they're both obscure and a little grating at times. so now norfolk & western will have to square off against loch lomond for the title of least known portland act that i like. what disturbed me even more is the absolute paucity of jennifer o'connor listeners. something needs to change about that. new album's out in august...ok?