I’ve been letting Last.FM track my music habits since October 2004 which is a hell of a long time in internet years. (Actually, thinking about it, you don’t see people making that net-time-compression comment much these days. Maybe things have stabilized. Or maybe the real world just caught up.)
I never really used the service but I figured it might come in useful one day and the wonderfully names Scrobbler wasn’t intrusive as it sat there feeding the stats. Now Last.FM is getting more useful and might have reached some kind of tipping point thanks, no doubt, to having this incredibly rich data set to play with. Their new Events recommendation service, based on your listening habits and those of your friends, is really impressive. This is the sort of thing web services should be doing once they’ve gathered a bunch of user data – Amazon do it well but where’s the recommendation stuff on Flickr or MySpace? It should be a no-brainer.
However, there is a quirk in my Last.fm stuff. I listen to music on random (or as we now call it “shuffle”) most of the time. This is drawn from a relatively small playlist containing a little under 4,000 tracks that I built for the 20 Gig iPod I’ve been borrowing this year. (If you’re interested my audio library has 16,533 items that will play for 54 days weighing 84.25 GB. And I thinned it down recently…) So when I play an album by a single artist a few times it really spikes on Last.fm.
Here are my “Top Artists” at the time of writing with the number of times I’ve listened to them in brackets:
1: The Magnetic Fields (926)
2: The Flaming Lips (666)
3: The Mountain Goats (642)
4: Pixies (603)
5: Misty’s Big Adventure (552)
6: The Kleptones (501)
7: Bright Eyes (489)
8: The Beatles (347)
9: Jeffrey Lewis (316)
10: The Decemberists (269)
That’s pretty representative of my music tastes, although I kinda got over my Magnetic Fields obsession a while back now and haven’t listened to 69 Love Songs on its own for ages.
However, Last.fm says I’ve played 27,821 tracks in the last two years which means those Magnetic Fields songs constitute a mere 3.3% of my listening. Number 20 (Freezepop) is 0.7%, Number 100 (ew, Snow Patrol) is 0.2% and then it plateaus into statistical irrelevance. Suddenly that top ten doesn’t seem so representative.
What can we conclude from this?
I’m so Long Tail it hurts.
(Can I get a t-shirt with that on?)
I’ve also felt that Last.fm is now really coming into its own – the events listing (with ticket buying also available!) being the real winner. I do feel a slight sense of internet annoyance though – my userid says it’s been active since Feb 2005 but I’m sure I registered quite a bit earlier than that but it lost my info. Bah. Lesson to me – when trying out new tools, talk about them on LJ (and tag them enough that I can find them again…).
“I’m so Long Tail it hurts.”
Reduce the dosage and I’m sure the pain will decrease.
I’m a relatively recent Last.fm convert, but I have to say that it’s probably my favourite Web 2.0 thing. I’ve used Flickr for considerably longer, but it hasn’t given me as much pleasure. I’ve written about Twitter today, but that’s only because it’s a much simpler proposition and I feel that I’ve “got” it fairly quickly. I’m still exploring Last.fm and I’m considering getting a subscription.
What I’m enjoying most about the service is twofold:
1 – a record of what I’m really listening to, rather than what I think I’m listening to. That might sound odd, but the two are often surprisingly different.
1 – visibility of what friends are listening to without specifically having to have “music conversations” (and also, as above, visibility of what friends are really listening to, etc).
And yeah, it reminds me a lot of Amazon. For several years around the turn of the century, I spent two or three hours a day browsing around Amazon, listening to sound samples and following “if you liked this…” recommendations.
If someone put a gun to my head and said that I could only surf one internet site from now onwards and I had to make a choice there and then, I still think it’d be Amazon.
Flaming Lips – 666 !
last.fm is great because once in installed it’s requires no upkeep, you can give it exactly enough attention as you like and never feel like your missing anything. The gig/event thing is a stroke of genius, what a great idea.
I also think of it as a free music backup tool, I’m beggining to think my library data is more important than any actual mp3 files. So if my drive crashed tomorrow then I’d look to last.fm to find out what to get. Files can easily be replaced but the names of obscure remixes are really important.
“my library data is more important than any actual mp3 files”
I think you could be onto something there. I had a hard drive crash a while back (nothing serious – forgot to unplug a firewire drive before updating OSX) and was more concerned about getting screenshots from iTunes as to what was on there that hadn’t been backed up than rescuing the actual files. CDs can be ripped, tracks downloaded and at the end of the day I’m not going to miss a decent chunk of it as there’s always new stuff out there. The data let me decide what was worth replacing.
So has anyone arranged a “Last.fm” meet through the events? I’m toying with it for Joanna Newsom next year..
And I LOVE the idea of using it as a backup.. just need to leave the computer on for… er… 62 days to play through every track and I’ll be sorted… perhaps not.
Mind you, the iTunes library file does that without having to play every track..
All I really need is for a way to tag certain tracks as “Do not last.fm”. Why? because my wife uses the computer to listen to music on the odd occassion, and whilst I don’t MIND Girls Aloud now and then, or Elvis, or George Michael… I’d really rather my Last.fm account was just MY songs. A minor bugbear.
You’ve all jumped much earlier, but now I’ve jumped too. I have done little else but feed it tracks since. It’s webcrack! It will take me a while to dial the obsessive chart checking down to a mangeable level…
I notice there are little dustbin logos next to every track listed, Gordon. Tried it; you can delete any track you don’t want to keep. Massage those stats anyway you like.