20k scrobbles!

Well, that's 20,000 plays recorded for me now through the joys of audioscrobbler, now hosted on Last.fm so I thought I'd give you all a post on it. The 20,000th song played, in case you're interested was a masterpiece by Nina Simone by the name of Sinnerman - you'll probably recognize it from the odd film or advert, absolutely beautiful and really passionate. Pretty hard to play on the old piano too.

So anyway, Last.fm, or audioscrobbler to the old school. It's a lot like the Pandora project, except that instead of merely taking in the names of a band or two that you like, and telling you what you might like, this takes in thousands of bits of user data every hour and fits them all together. As such, you get very intelligent recommendations not based on genre or style, but on what other people who like <song>, like.

Firstly, just the novelty of the thing is pretty fun. It records everything you listen to, and you can find out what songs or artists you've listened to most, and unlike iTunes or whatever your media player is, it'll hold over a resort of your music collection, or a new computer etc. You can also see what embarrassing tat your friends are listening to, always good for a mocking.

It assigns you musical neighbours, and does a damn good job of it, and your neighbours will have similar tastes, but sometimes a widely different range of top bands, and quite often in their recently played, or most loved sections, you'll find something you've never heard of. Likewise, there's groups for like minded people, or just for friends, which can simply be used to see which bands are top among those members that week, or more importantly, as a way of getting into the community and getting some fab recommendations or rare recordings.

The community there is pretty fun and vibrant, though I'm not really too involved with it - little time, and you find some right idiots on there to laugh at too, which is always fun. Still though, you meet some cool people and get recommended some great stuff, and if you're ever looking for something new, try their various radio stations, all user-generated (not picked, generated) - you can get some very interesting things up there.

Some other cool features - picture blankets generated based on whatever you, or whoever you're looking at has been listening to, charts generated for forum signatures etc, shoutboxes, tags, journals, free tracks...

So, Sinnerman's great, audioscrobbler's great, what're you waiting for? Go sign up.

See the 'about me' bit for an example of my charts, here's a screenie of my homepage there: