The Cargo Cult Fandom

Here is the late, great physicist Richard Feynman explaining “cargo cults”: 

“In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.”

That is from his speech to the 1974 graduating class of Caltech warning them about what he saw as the proliferation of what he called “cargo cult science” and how easy it is to fool yourself into believing things.

What brought it to mind was the recent K-Pop meltdown over Last.fm, an app that you probably haven’t thought about in years, if at all. 

The TL;DR on last.fm is that it’s had many forms and functions over the years (including as Internet “radio”) but, as of 2026, the purpose is to track every single thing you listen to via “scrobbles.” These scrobbles allow you to quantify your listening habits and turn the analog act of listening to music into metrics! It’s the app that monitors your listening habits like your blood sugar levels.

Why was there a meltdown over last.fm? Well, below is the weekly chart from June 18-25, 2026. The first column here is “listeners” and the second one is “number of scrobbles.” Note the massive difference between BTS (with slightly fewer listeners than Mitski) and the artists on either side of them.

Now, this is what the Daily Chart looked like on June 24th:

And this is what the Daily Chart looked like on June 25th:

The reactions from BTS fans were totally normal! Just kidding, they were over the top hysterical and BTS fans doubled down on all their favorite tactics: calling last.fm misogynists and racists, claiming to be the saviors of pop music, etc. etc.

Why the huge meltdown? An algorithm switch ranking based on listeners, not scrobbles.

I wrote a post last year simply titled, “The Metrics Stans,” and we’re seeing the exact same behavior running wild over last.fm.

To pull it back to Feynman, it’s all the Cargo Cult mentality at work. These stans have done everything they can to mimic large scale popularity. They’ve built networks of fans who mass purchase CDs and mp3s. They generate thousands of dummy social media accounts and email addresses to boost popularity numbers. Fans even have the B-CD (BTS Chart-Data) app that helps to bundle song streams to feed into sites like last.fm. And yet, when the algorithm is tweaked slightly, the facade comes crashing down and their earphones are revealed to be made of coconut shells.

(Which they may as well be, considering very little of this furious, gamified “streaming” actually involves listening to music.)

I’ve been observing this behavior for years and it’s only gotten worse as time goes on. What I can’t quite figure out is why.

I can certainly understand thinking that your favorite artist is the best. I think my favorite artist is the best and I think it’s great when other people like them too! Do I think it’s cool when their videos hit a million views? Yeah! But even if a song only gets a thousand views, it doesn’t change my opinion. I still think they’re the best.

Which is why I have had a hard time squaring the circle of why the validation of metrics are so important to these particular fans to the point that a change in algorithm can trigger a fandom meltdown. 

Monia has written about the parallel world of cyberspace and in her (excellent!) post she talks about the way fans were trained to curate (including via last.fm) these massive archives of content and statistics for free.

This home grown infrastructure wasn’t perfect, but it was significantly different because there was no monetization, no commercial exploitation. Bad actors still existed, catfishing and other online frauds are not unheard of.

But being part of that scene, the constantly shifting ground, it’s impossible to see ourselves in context. It’s hard for me, to see how easily we offered up our goods, our trust, in things that were part of the escalation into the full-blown attention market we see today.

All it took was the fan industries tweaking the existing behavior to get it working for them. Instead of curating archives of gifs to be used on LiveJournal, stans are out there curating streams to create the illusion of popularity in order to make Hybe’s bottom line go up. 

Stans caught up in the metrics cargo cult will claim that faking big metrics is how to support their favorite artist to ensure a steady supply of content in the future. Yet, many examples exist to the contrary—popular artists break up (see also: Arashi, SMAP, etc.) and small, niche artists hang around touring forever and ever and ever (e.g. Shonen Knife is still touring). Sure, we should all put our money where our mouths are and buy an album to support our favorite artist if we can afford it but this idea that you need to scrobble obsessively or drop thousands of dollars on mp3s you don’t need is incredibly toxic. It turns off normie listeners and leads to fandom burnout in the long run.

Enjoy what you enjoy; support your favorite musician; but don’t act as free labor for multimillion dollar corporations. You don’t need metrics of what you’ve listened to. What will it really tell you?

Chart from my brief time scrobbling on last.fm. Wow, I like Arashi, Taemin, and Perfume! Good thing I had metrics to tell me that.