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

[umlauts.livejournal.com]

I find that I don't pay attention to it, and occasionally I leave Winamp going when I leave the room so it thinks I listened to something 6700 times, which I didn't really.

My charts are not an accurate representation of who I am. Absolutely, not even remotely close.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

If not at least for the reason that I suspect the vast majority of peoples music collection isn't on ver computer!

warning: i have just started a cup of very strong coffee and may well talk and talk and talk

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

IE if I like it enough to have it on cd then I will listen to it on a stereo with decent sound apart from rub old computer speakers.

I generally put stuff on random anyway - I suppose all it picks up with me is particular one-off favourites. IE when I have to listen to King Kong Song five times before I stop wanting to sing along to the deep doo-wop backing bits, or when I have to listen to MUCHACHO DE LOS OJOS TRISTE and recline on bed like melancholy senorita in a siesta.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is true but theoretically it shouldnt make a difference, if what IS on the computer is representative of the kind of stuff someone listens to. (And if it isn't, then the qn "why not" is even more interesting I guess)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I love watching last.fm but it's been REALLY SHIT for the past few days, not recording tracks for up to 12hrs after I actually played them. LAME.

It's really skewed towards album artists in terms of the data it flags up - I think when I listened to the 23-track Tori Amos album twice to review, it sent it zooming up to No 1. I do now try to listen to promos on my discman or ipod first (there is apparently a way to record what you listen to on your ipod but I downloaded it and I can't get it to work).

It doesn't always acknowledge repeat listenings - the first weekend of 'Umbrella' it recorded maybe one every four or five plays.

Mine is totally skewed by what I have to review - of my top 10 I've had to write about 8 recently, which is why they were on repeat.

Tagging = 1x major issue with the genres I like, with their featurings and their remixes and what have you.

I am always kind of conscious of it but I really don't listen to anything I wouldn't want people to know about, and I never have itunes on random anyway...the only 'artificial' thing I do is sometimes make sure that a track I want to big up is one of my last 10, so stays on the front page (this is also on my facebook and myspazz profiles).

Top weekly artists can be surprising.

Both the poptimists and ilx last.fm groups are disgraces to life and taste.

These are all whingey comments but I do love it really! I like seeing what other people listen to.

[umlauts.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Also some musics I don't consume at my computer even though it's on it. Some music is for the portable player, innit.

Re: warning: i have just started a cup of very strong coffee and may well talk and talk and talk

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I've plugged my computer into my proper speakers now (don't really have a CD player to speak of) - though yes, having to import something when I want to listen to it = choosing to listen to something else instead.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

It's certainly not representative in my case. I haven't got an iPod, and don't use slsk, which means that nearly all of the stuff on my computer is downloads from you lot. Which is obv heavily biased towards new stuff that is fairly poppy, in one way or another. You'd never guess from my Winamp stats that over the last fortnight I've been listening to Shudder To Think and Band Of Susans almost as much as everyone else put together.

[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.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Also, if I'm in front of my computer I am likely to be programming, which has v.diff functional requirements music-wise than e.g. commuting.

[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]

I just don't play that much music on my laptop - it's either stereo or work computer (work comp = not web 2.0 friendly!) so my charts mostly date from 2005 when the old monolith was still working and I was constantly listening to the Fall and Spanish techno. HOWEVER my most recently played stuff is fairly accurate as I was making mixtapes for Glasto innit.

(I am katstevens101 if anyone wants to add me)

[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!

[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.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was trying to phrase something about people whose 'computer content' mainly comes from 'tastemakers' (I mean that in the sense of provenance from people of a similar sort of musical mindset before anyone opens up any tins of worms).

[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]

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)

[cis.livejournal.com]

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

yes! In fact I am the kind of mentalist who has even been known to CHOOSE a record and leave it running while I go down to cook, i.e. I am a PSEUD and a DIRTY LIAR and relentlessly FIDDLE with my DATA so that stuff I consider less [representative / cool / etc] does not show up on my weekly chart but falls off the bottom. (i don't care about the recently-played thing too much although I do enjoy it when it's 10 the same track or similar.) Still - iscrobbler doesn't pick up anything I've played on my ipod, so it's already missing a large chunk of my listening, and in a way i'm just replacing those. but basically I am a huge faker, it's very sad.

he stuff I listen to on my computer when I'm working tends to be dances music, ambient or classical - stuff I can't get distracted into singing along with, stuff i listen to in full albums - and so perhaps there's a bias toward that on there. My top artist on last.fm is glenn gould (which made me feel kind of self-conscious when Jessica P had that blog post about people who also listen to more high-culture music or whatever), and it seems he'll never be suplanted. This is, though, mostly cos e.g. the goldberg variations are all about a minute long and there are about thirty-two of them (compare the ABS album: same length, twelve tracks, or any of my collection of dj sets which are three hours over one track).

I have NEVER used the recommendations and haven't bothered with the radio bit in YEARS.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I reckon most people's musical preferences change according to where they are and what they are doing. And even for your average member of poptimists, sitting in front of the computer bvggering around on the internet doesn't constitute the majority of their listening time.

[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!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I sometimes look at what tracks my last.fm radio comes up with for me but surely if I wanted to listen to them I could just, like, click on them?

I had a track recommended to me by a last.fm friend for the first time ever today! I am eagerly anticipating finding out how that works when I am done with the tennis.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I am http://www.last.fm/user/lexpretend/ btw.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

It doesn't do ANYTHING, does it?? Just says "here is a song you might like", go find it? I clicked on a recommendation thing one (it was molly recommending francoise hardy!) and nothing happened...