You have to admit that you – yes you – have been to a fansite or two in your time. A fansite meaning, specifically, to be a website dedicated to a celebrity or popular topic of some kind (I.E.: a film series) made by an “average Joe” type of fan/admirer who is not affiliated with the subject itself in any formal way. When I was a youngster1, celebrity websites of almost any kind were always official and endorsed by the celebrity and/or their management. Nowadays that is definitely not the case. There are fansites to anything and everything, and there are more often than not multiple ones for a single topic. When there are multiple fansites for a single thing, things can get pretty complicated.
One of the biggest “complexities” of the fansite world is the naming of these sites in regards to the celebrity or topic they are dedicated to. There seems to be a very specific algorithm used by fansite creators to determine just how their domains and site titles are chosen, and I have finally exposed it! Amazing! I shall now explain to you all the extremely difficult and tedious task of choosing a fansite name, but please: do not try this at home!
STEP 1: Make it sound official even though it’s not official.
We all know that if a website claims to be official and thus represent or be endorsed by someone but doesn’t have that credibility, that can result in some big trouble! Oh my, we do not want that. So to avoid any legal issues surrounding representation and/or affiliation, you can’t use the words “official”, “approved”, “endorsed”, “authorized”, “recognized”, or any of those other awesome words because that would be a big boo boo.
STEP 2: Register a .com, .net, or .org with [some form of] the topic’s name in it.
This one actually makes sense to me, though, because you obviously want a domain name that says what the site is about. Keep in mind that even when yahoo.com and google.com were new on the block people had no idea what they were when they saw/heard the name. Thus, if you name your site something that is not correlated to the topic of your site, you might hurt your traffic in the long run. The closer you can get to the actual name of the topic of your site, such as a celebrity’s working name (I.E.: britneyspears.com for Britney Spears), the better. If you need a dash in between the first and last names of a person, you may do that. You may also cut down the first name of a person to a single letter and leave the last name intact if that’s what it takes to get a relevant domain (I.E.: kstewart.com for Kristen Stewart) purchased. Hell, if you’ve got the funds, buy anything and everything you can that is related to the person’s name. It doesn’t really matter as long as it goes to the same place under the same crappy site title which is in step 3.
STEP 3: Use specific “keywords” in your site’s title to make it seem more important and useful than it really is.
There are a lot of words that are used over and over and over by fansites that used to seem really innovative, but because they are used over and over and over, they are definitely not. Oh well! Use them anyway so you can fit in! There are levels of superiority in the keywords, so chose wisely. If there were two fansites to a person/topic with the same title that would be some epic dramarama right there and hate mail or possible hacking would ensue. The highest and most desirable level of keywords consists of thing such as:
celebrity name + “fan”; “fans”; “online”; “network”; “source”; “web”; “daily”
If none of these are available because there are just too damn many fansites for the topic you are making another fansite about, make something up that is vague but overall positive, like “Supergirl” or “We love ____” or another unoriginal name/phrase. If you end up doing this, step 4 will definitely be more important to you!
STEP 4: Pad your site description and content with propagandistic and exaggerated words to infer your site is superior to all others around.
This is a rather crucial step for every fansite and not just those that didn’t get a great domain name or site title. If you want your fansite to seem like it is the cream of the crop regardless of the content you have on it, you have to advertise like it is! Using phrases like “non-stop” and “24/7″ make the site sound as though it is always ready to report news and the latest stuff visitors may want, even though fansite owners can’t be available non-stop, 24/7 to update their sites2. Content should also speak to the visitor on a personal and individual level, so using identifying words like “you” and “your” to directly address the visitor at that moment is a good strategy. The last part of this step is to mix in various words representing quality and excellence throughout a fansite to reassure the visitor that your site is the best site to be at. The most commonplace words/phrases are “best”, “number 1″, “ultimate”, “definitive”, and “premier”3. Try to jam in as many of these as you can in as much space as you can find because invariably the next owner who makes a fansite to the same topic you have a fansite for will utilize this strategy. Thus, you might as well join the club and follow suit because if you don’t say your site is the best then what kind of fansite owner are you, anyway?
Voila! You now know the secret to success in the fansite world! Now that you have been briefed on the most tedious and painstaking steps of the fansite creation process, I highly encourage you to go out and make a fansite for something that already has a half a dozen fansites and see how well you do. Good luck!
- …referring to a time when Google was virtually unknown, social networking had not been coined, and a cell phone could only be used for communicating verbally. †
- If the fansite owner(s) are indeed available non-stop, 24/7 then there are much bigger problems going on that need to be dealt with off the internet entirely. †
- The word “premiere” is probably used more than “premier”, but this is only because people are too stupid to realize the former is inaccurate in the vast majority of cases. Oh well. No biggie, right? †
The evolution of musical tastes.
When a person is up late and fairly bored but has access to the internet, strange things are bound to happen. During my late night internet adventures of March 29th into March 30th, I somehow discovered a rather fascinating web application of sorts that gave me rather detailed information about the music I listen to most often. The application didn’t simply track the number of times I had played a song by a particular artist or how many times overall I had listened to a single artist; the application did all of that, but also graphed how much I listened to an artist and whatnot over various periods of time. When I saw this, I was blown away and thus ended up playing with the application for quite some time just to laugh at my own evolving musical tastes (as the title of this entry suggests). After seeing all of the graphs, though, I knew I wanted to share the statistics with other people and perhaps get others to use the web application themselves to see their own results over time.
I registered with the website Last.fm originally in 2005 and always found the service of simply recording every song I played in iTunes very interesting. Last.fm is an internationally popular website based out of the UK that allows users to create a profile for themselves that displays statistics about what music they listen to through various audio applications. My own profile – which you can access freely at Last.fm if you choose – is similar to most user profiles and generates data based on music tracks I’ve recently listened to (in ‘Recently Listened Tracks‘), the most played artists in my musical library (in ‘User’s Library‘), and even progressive charts spanning from 7 days to over 12 months showing the most played artists and songs in my library (in ‘Top Artists‘ and ‘Top Tracks‘, respectively). Last night, however, I was curious enough to locate a different way of looking at my data through the Last.fm Playground and the free Scrobbling Timeline web application. This is how I generated the graphs and overall statistics for my playing habits that I found too interesting to not share! After examining all the graphs I was able to create, I saved a key few to show how musical taste overall can drastically change over the course of less than two years. My evidence is as follows…
Scrobbling Timeline: 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
I have listened to Japanese pop artist Ayumi Hamasaki since 2002, so when I registered my Last.fm account she was already well-established in my musical interests. I have a huge amount of music of hers on my iPod, and thus she has consistently been one of my most played artists over time. At the same time, I know I have begun listening to her less and less over the years, so I was curious to see how accurate that assumption was. I thus generated the following overall cumulative timeline graph of how much I listen to Ayumi Hamasaki during the life of my user account:
Ayumi Hamasaki (cumulative timeline) - Click to enlarge to full size for better viewing
This graph displays how many times I have played tracks by Ayumi Hamasaki, how long it took me to reach the total number of played tracks, and what tracks I played at various intervals such as the 1st track and the 1000th track. As the graph shows, I listened to Ayumi Hamasaki enough around mid-2008 (when my account was registered) to reach the play “milestones” of #1 through #100 almost immediately. It took me a good while to reach milestone #500 in early 2009, but then a rather long time to get to play milestone #1000 in mid-2009. Having listened to her an approximate 1,220 times overall, I have only listened to her about 220 times since hitting the #1000 milestone on August 12th, 2009. That was a substantial amount of time ago, and the chart shows how my listening of her music literally “flattened out” after the #1000 play mark. At that rate, it is likely it will take a very, very long time for me to get to the #2000 mark.
Scrobbling Timeline: t.A.T.u.
Similar to Ayumi Hamasaki, I had listened to Russian duo t.A.T.u. for a long time even before I registered my Last.fm account. Though no longer making music together, they released three albums of English music and three albums of Russian music (not including compilation or remix albums) during their career as a duo. On October 21st of 2008, t.A.T.u. released what would be their last Russian album that had been continually a source of frustration for fans because of delays and changes. Upon its release, though, I played it pretty much non-stop. Here is the generated cumulative timeline:
t.A.T.u. (cumulative timeline) - Click to enlarge to full size for better viewing
In total, I have listened to t.A.T.u. the most out of any of the artists in my music library with over 3,500 total plays. I quickly racked up enough plays to reach the first six play milestones – #10 to #2000 – from mid-2008 to only a few days before 2009 hit. Since the release of their last Russian album in October as mentioned previously, I was still enjoying it enough through the beginning of 2009 to hit the #3000 play milestone a few months later on May 18th. It took me seven months to go from 500 to 1000 plays with Ayumi Hamasaki, so in comparison to her, I have listened to t.A.T.u. a heck of a lot more in the same amount of time.
Scrobbling Timeline: Josh Groban
Although he’s been highly active in the music industry since his self-titled debut album was released in 2001, I didn’t really listen to any of Josh Groban’s music until mid-way through 2008. Even then, I only listened to a very select few – perhaps half a dozen – of his songs on occasion. In September of 2009 as the chart below shows, I some how decided I was going to start listening to all of his other music. The results were quite surprising and also very hilarious:
Josh Groban (cumulative timeline) - Click to enlarge to full size for better viewing
According to my Last.fm charts and this graph, when I started listening to a wee bit more of Josh Groban’s music in October 2009 – when I hit the #100 plays milestone – I must have been somewhat intrigued. Starting in January 2010, though, my recorded plays of his music began to increase much more before spiking and going through the roof in February through March. At the beginning of February I had not reached the #500 plays mark, but less than one month later I had already surpassed the #1000 plays milestone. It is now in the very last few days of March entirely and I am nearly up to 1,400 plays, thus making Josh Groban the second most-played artist in my entire library.
I’ve always been aware of changes in preferred music in myself and other people. It’s just a part of life that everyone goes through as we try new things and experience different sounds we were unaware of before. However, most of us don’t get to see the actual data on how our tastes and preferences evolve over a long period of time in a nice diagram! If any of you have a Last.fm account you’ve been using for a while, I highly recommend you check out the application used for the data graphs to see how your own musical interests have changed. You’ll be fascinated and possibly shocked when you see what the numbers reveal!
