LAST FM

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Because I have been working at home today I have been absolutely CANING last.fm (under my cunning disguise of freakytrigger), obsessively hitting REFRESH on the 'dashboard' so's I can taste-stalk my 'friends'. Unsurprisingly since the heart of LFM is big graphs of stuff I am a monster nerd for it, however not as much as some who have multiple accounts enabled for multiple genres wtf wtf.

So my question is - if you have it, do you find it affects how you listen, do you keep one eye on the minute hand when a shite track is playing, are you afeard to leave the itunes on "random", does it recommend you good stuff, do you think your charts are an accurate representation of you or not, are you the kind of MENTALIST who would choose to play one thing rather than another simply because you want it to be higher on your charts (btw I AM THIS PERSON :(:(:(:(_)

And if you don't have it is this any kind of principled decision?

And what do the top tracks/artists say about the Internet Nation???

JUST TALK ABOUT IT BASICALLY

(I have found myself thinking incidentally that a better way to do CANONS wd be to pick the top 30 all time tracks on Last FM)

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I only have a vague idea what it is, so I don't understand all you say. Does it just log what MP3s you play on your PC? Does it log CDs played there?

If I had it, and if I am on the right track of what it is, it would be unrepresentative because a lot of the MP3s I play on my PC are reviewing assignments for Stylus, so I hate quite a lot of them.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It logs mp3s and CDs..

I listen to a lot of new stuff for evaluation purposes which I end up hating - overall one play of one track will barely be a blip on the radar.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

wrt CDs, it only logs them if it can recognise the tracklisting off CDDB. So e.g. my copy of The KLF's White Room for some reason comes up as The Best Of Talk Talk.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

That's the tagging problem again though, but my computer always asks if it doesn't recognise a CD/recognises it wrong. I don't mind manually tagging stuff, I have to do it for a lot of promos of albums which aren't out yet.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah it does those things (it doesn't log CDs for me, but I think it does for most ppl).

The key is that you use it to see what yr mates are listen to, and also it has build in radio stations so you can get recommendations, listen to "artists similar to [artist you like]", listen to stations based on friends' tastes etc.

I never use the radio stuff tho!

[(Anonymous)]

I, on the other hand, love the radio bit. I think it's particularly useful for me on the grounds that I have always had a vast knowledge of music but been too tight to buy everything I liked (and even too lazy to take promos to M&VE and replace them with better stuff), and too hung up/technophobic for the free download era. So the personalised radio thing gets me to stuff I like but don't own, as well as playing stuff I do own but might not have got round to hearing. Meanwhile, I've never got the scrobbler thing to work with my ITunes, so it solely picks up what I've listened to on the radio. From a very sceptical starting point (I think the idea of customised consumption of TV/newspapers/etc would leave us underexposed to stuff we didn't know we'd like), I've come to like it a lot, and discovered a reasonable amount of songs I'd never heard before...
Mark M

[pastels-badge.livejournal.com]

My recommendations are usually really insulting to my musical knowledge. Like, Pavement, My Bloody Valentine...even the Beatles. I have used the "radio" functions a few times and usually if I just keep skipping past stuff I already know I don't like and so forth, eventually I get to some actual interesting stuff.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think I'll get a bit exasperated if it notices me listening to lots of old Hi and Stax stuff and the like and suggests I might like to try Otis Redding or something like that.