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

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The thing is, looking at the people on LFM whose music tastes I think I know fairly well, I can almost always recognise my idea of their tastes in what they've been playing, even if a specific band or song isn't represented much. Maybe that's what I mean by 'representative'.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Hmm I think perhaps a little - but in the overall 'consumption' it's a representation within a very small slice of pie so I don't really know if you can glean so much from that as you're thinking... I mean you're basing stuff on things that have been played three times as opposed to once and it's a bit micro...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think the sample size of total plays needs to get quite large for that to work. What I mean is, looking at yr profile, say, it would be a fools errand to go "OH her favourite bands are ABBA, Dexy's, and Dizzee Rascal" (tho Dexy's is surely one of them), but even from yours you could say "right, bit of nindie but with a jangly/80s bent, pop both classic and modern tending to novelties", which wouldn't be a totally unfair thing to surmise! (I reckons)

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

The thing is there are huges differences in the way I listen to all of those - Abba = I have a huge pool of Abba songs and dip into them fairly at random, Dexys was one of the rare instances I put on an album because I was ripping it in order to put it on the mp3 player, and I only have like two Dizzee mp3s!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes this is what I'm saying - it's meaningless for making assumptions about individual bands (mostly - you could work out for instance that braisedbywolves likes the Mountain Goats a lot) and you can't deduce attitudinal data from usage data, but in terms of broad tastes I think it does a fairly good job - the sticking point is that iscrobbler is rub and so mobile music (which *is* likely to be quite different for many people) doesn't get represented.