My thoughts on Last.fm
I’ve only been a Last.fm member for about three months. When I originally signed up I thought of it as simply a web app that would catalogue all the music I was listening to, however, it quickly grew into much more.
Now it seems that my main use for the site as geared itself more towards finding “new” bands (I of course put “new” in quotes because those bands are only new to me). I’ll play a CD from a band that I like and then use the links that Last.FM provide to surf over to the profiles of the top fans for that artist. Then I’ll search through their top 100 artists and visit the PureVolume profile of any artists that I’ve not listened to already. I’ve found probably around 20 or so bands this way and I’ve been picking up their CD’s as often as I can.
Which brings be back to the cataloguing aspect of the site, or more accurately the iScrobbler plugin that makes the site useful to me. For the first month or so, the plugin worked beautifully. Unfortunately (only unfortunate for Last.fm usage), we received a new itunes and ipod firmware version from Apple. Now the new software adds some really great functionality and organizational features, however it breaks iPod Scrobbling (sp?). It still works perfectly within iTunes, however I’m a pretty busy person between school and work, so most of my music enjoyment takes place on the iPod. This means that if I really want to make sure all music I listen to gets properly scrobbled (sp?) then I have to create smart playlists that contain everything I’m listening to each day and then play them at night while I sleep to catch up. The problem with that is that the iPod keeps it’s podcasts, videos, and music in completely separate sections of the ipod now, so these smart playlists will only pick up the music.
This causes many inaccuracies in the cataloguing of my music listening habits. Some of the music I listen to is getting catalogued while others are not. Another issue that is skewing the results is a psychological anomaly that I’ve noticed. When you know that your music habits are being recorded, you tend to change your habits a bit. You may be scrolling through your iPod, come across Sugarcult in the list, and think “I like these guys, I’ll listen to them”. Only you remember that you’ve listened to that CD 4 times already, so you pass them up to look for a band you haven’t listened to much before.
This also has a secondary side effect. If you are curbing your listening habits in this way, it will completely falsify your top artist results. As an example, I’m currently listening to the Runaway World EP from Making April. Now the CD only has eight tracks. This means that if I listen to it and five other CD’s ranging from track lengths between ten and fourteen (making sure to only listen to each artist once), Making april will show up as my sixth favorite in that group when in reality I may like them far more than those other five bands. In fact, if you look at my all time favorite artists, the majority of them are bands that I have several CD’s from. Simply because they have recorded more tracks, they receive more playtime.
Alright, Making April’s CD has finished, so I think I’ll finish this little journal entry up also. I could go into my feeling about the failures of the “Charts for your MySpace, Blog, or Website” feature, but I’ll save that for another time. Happy listening everyone…
posted by Christopher SchneseÂ
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