Music Venue With the Most Foursquare Check-Ins in 2010? Terminal 5. (Mercury Lounge's Third.)

pic by Rob Harvilla

Florence, trying to unlock the Crunked badge with her mind at Terminal 5.

Somewhat interesting: the music venue with the most Foursquare check-ins for 2010 was NY-concert airplane hanger Terminal 5, announced on the Foursquare blog earlier this week. This is a global ranking too, though it's understandable why a New York hub with 10-15 shows a month at a 3000-person capacity would draw more Foursquare users than of a 17000-person arena like LA's Hollywood Bowl, which came in second. (East Coast is far deeper into the 4S game than West, according to this map of global check-ins.) But even more curious? A far smaller Bowery Presents venue, the 250-person Mercury Lounge, had the third most check-ins of the year, more than either Radio City Music Hall or Bowery Ballroom.

Makes sense that Terminal 5 registers ahead of everything else: 1) Terminal 5's booking catered more to thumb talkers than, say, the Rockettes' Christmas Spectacular in 2010; 2) Madison Square Garden hosts bulls, basketballs, and bands, thus isn't strictly qualified as one music venue (the preferred 4S designation is "stadium"); 3) Larger fan herding grounds like Roseland or Hammerstein don't have shows frequently enough to reach a critical mass; 4) By some flimsy metric, Terminal 5 is the "Third Best Club in the World"; 5) T5 is in midtown, surrounded by businesses who'd hire social-media-marketing goons trying to manipulate the Mayorship for advertising (looking at you, Gus H., who has an indelicately invested interest in the American Retro Bar & Grill).

But why did the Mercury Lounge have more check-ins than the Bowery Ballroom or Webster Hall last year? With their double-booked nights, does the smallest of the three just have more total shows bringing in a wider swath of people? It's true that seeing a band there is more of a compactly scheduled experience in a densely social neighborhood. So are bad planners actually using the tool as it's intended: to see what's going on later, and with whom? Even more perplexing, who is this Jason from Islip and why isn't Ryan Muir Mayor?

blog.foursquare.com