I've Been Audioscrobbled!
By Matthew Toledo - 8/16/2006
I'm of the personal opinion that the diversity and quality of FM radio in Athens, Ohio leaves something to be desired. Sure, there is late night WOUB, and if you are older, WEAK is a godsend, but if you want to listen to music from this decade with a little less gospel, twang or bling-bling you're only outlet is the internet.
The great thing about the internet is the enormous amount of information that it contains. Consequently, the unfortunate thing about the internet is the enormous amount of information that it contains. There is just so much crap to sift through in order to find what you want. While search tools like Google make it easy to find the exact music that you are looking for, it is often hard to discover new music that suits your personal tastes. I've longed to find a website that could provide me with intelligent music and artist recommendations based on what I'm already listening to. If you think about it, this used to be the job of the guy behind the counter of the record store.
Ture, there are other sites that try to make suggestions for you, but they usually receive their recommendations from major label marketing reps.
Last.fm
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Enter the new website, last.fm. Born on July 14th of 2006, the website is similar to myspace and friendster in that they both make use of social networking to build online communities. However, it goes beyond myspace by also providing its users with musical recommendations. It accomplishes this by blending something called an Audioscrobbler with a collaborative filtering algorithm on last.fm's servers. Sounds bizarre, right? I'll try to explain it in plain English.
First, you need to sign up for a free account on last.fm's website. I've been a member for over a month now and I haven't received a single piece of spam from them yet. The next step is to download their last.fm application. The program is basically a simple browser combined with an open-sourced piece of software written in C# called an Audioscrobbler. The Audioscrobbler sounds a bit kinky, but have no fear, it began as a computer science project by Richard "RJ" Jones that he created while attending the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. He released the technology to the internet. Now programmers from around the world maintain the code. As a result, the software does not contain any spyware or malware that could damage your computer.
Audio-whatski?
The Audioscrobbler keeps track of all the songs that you play on your computer via I-tunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, or any of the dozens of other media players available to computer users. You have a lot of choices. Whenever you play a song, the name of the artist and the song are uploaded to last.fm's servers. They maintain a history of the music you play. After a certain threshold is reached, the website will provide you with links to other people on last.fm that have similar musical tastes as your own. They call these people your "neighbors." It will also recommend music to you based on the songs that your online friends listen to. The last.fm application will can also link you to similar artists to the one you are currently listening to.
Last.fm is in the business of making musical recommendations based on the tastes of it's users. These recommendations are not being handed down to us from a corporate music machine. While many of the artists recommended are on major labels, this is due to the fact that statistically, more people listen to major label music. There are, however, a substantial amount of links to lesser known indie and underground bands. For example, I discovered that my band is on there!
A Tool For Local Musicians?
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Two days ago a thought occurred to me, "I wonder if anyone out there has ever scrobbled Red Dahlia?" Lo and behold, someone has! I went down a quick mental list of bands that I knew. Fine Dining, Southeast Engine, The Arch Villains, Red Wanting Blue, Skeletonwitch, even old, dead bands like Geraldine, Planet 12 and Homunculus were listed.
Unfortunately, many of the local bands were lacking artist descriptions, photographs or album covers. While it's nice to know that someone besides yourself is listening to your band, last.fm is not much of a promotional tool unless it contains more information about your group besides just your band name. Red Dahlia's bio was listed partly because we used something called Tune-core to get our music listed on a different online music stores (story on Tune-core to follow). I'm assuming Southeast Engine did something similar or just has someone in the band who is web savvy. So, what about the rest of us? How do we update or band's information? What if we're not on the website at all and we want to be?
It's quite easy to update a band's biography. The website uses a wiki for the band bio. If any of you are familiar with wikipedia.org, you know that absolutely anyone can update a page on wikipedia's website. The same goes for last.fm's website. Anyone can update an artist's biography.
Uploading artwork takes more effort. You can upload a band picture. However, if the band has fewer than 100 fans, 3 of the fans have to agree that the photo you uploaded is acceptable. If your band has more than 100 fans, the number of yes votes increases to 10. There is a way around this, you can contact a last.fm moderator and ask him to approve the band photo for you. The best way to update your band info, however, is to start your own last.fm record label.
Start a Real of Fake Record Label
Once you register your own fake or real record label with last.fm, you will be able to "manage artists." In this case, it will be your own band. You will be able to upload songs, photos, cover art, and you can see a list of all the people who have listened to your songs in the last X amount of days. You will also be able to promote your band by purchasing banner ad impressions. $25 bucks will get your banner ad displayed on 1000 similar artist websites. You're not paying for clicks, just page impressions--it's not the best deal, but I'm still going to try it.
I can totally see musician collectives like Future Perfect Media, The Lemon House Collective, or the Aquabear Legion adding all of their bands to this service. However, like I stated, you don't have to have a real record label. If you are a solo artist, you can just make your label name the same as your band name.
Tools For Bloggers
The power of the blog is amazing. Hence, the reason why I've gone out of my way to build a superior blogging tool on the AMN. Last.fm puts out RSS feeds of the music you are listening to. This will give you the ability to incorporate either your top 10 songs, artists, or your current play list into your AMN blog or any other blog for that matter. Show the world your superior personal music taste by incorporating this feature onto your future blog posts. For example, the chart to the right shows the artists I've been listening to this week. Come back Monday and you'll see it change. You can see all of my other charts here.
Overall, A Sweet Service
You can see that last.fm is a pretty neat service that is currently available for free. For musicians, this is yet another way of promoting your band. For the music listener, this is an excellent way to discover new bands and discover new people with similar musical tastes. All in all, I highly recommend that you get yourself autoscrobbled on last.fm today!
