Last.fm Trends: Into The Now With R.E.M.

March 3, 2011 2:14 PM

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r e m Last.fm Trends: Into The Now With R.E.M.

R.E.M. is on the comeback trail, with 15th album Collapse Into Now released next week alongside short films for each track.

As stalwarts of American rock, does R.E.M.’s new material still hold the same excitement for fans as classic favorites like “Losing My Religion” and “Shiny Happy People”? Last.fm Trends looks into their scrobbles to find out.

According to Last.fm, the band’s top tracks over the last six months reflect a definitive bias toward their older material: “Losing My Religion” is now 20 years old, but it’s by far their most popular track with 3,374,299 scrobbles from 604,612 listeners. Newest track “Imitation of Life” hails from 2001′s Reveal, but the highest-charted track from R.E.M.’s last album, Accelerate, is “Supernatural Superserious,” which resides at the #32 spot.

It seems that a short film project is a way of adding interest to the traditional release process after 31 years for both band and fans alike, but listeners seem to be responding well to the digitally-prereleased tracks so far: Listeners to “Überlin“ have ramped that song up to place it 13th in the band’s chart for last week.