Thanks for the mention. That post I wrote seemed to stir up a bit of controversy, interestingly enough.

I totally agree with your post – most clients are likely to be in the middle. The client I wrote about should have found it easy to succeed with such a tightly defined user-base, but they forgot to speak to them during the design process.

Taking a quick look at Matt Brown’s post on lastFM, he says he recruited “Long-time users who’ve been with us for years; new users still discovering what we do; friends and relatives; random people [...]”

Two of the four in that list are very tightly screened recruits. I’d bet my bottom dollar that he wouldn’t make any substantial design changes following feedback from randoms who don’t even have a personal music player.

LastFM didn’t grow it’s mass appeal by starting out aiming for the masses. The masses took a while to catch up.