Listen Up

I listen to a lot of music. On my iPod and on my laptop you will find a vast array of recently played tracks in one playlist (smart or otherwise) or another. My tastes are usually somewhere between formerly-mainstream, alternative and American soft rock. However I also like a few other oddities (Buffy musical anyone?).

I have a last.fm account and this tracks and reports on my music tastes. It started as just another random mechanism for living on the internet but has become incredibly useful. The process is called Scrobbling and what it means is that if if i am on my laptop and listening to iTunes then what i listen to is recorded on my last.fm profile.

Creepy? Not really. Why do I care if you know what I hear? The benefit though is that when the website combines all of this data it is able to feed me recommendations. By analyzing what I listen to most and what others who have similar tastes listne to, it is able to play me a ‘radio station’ of things I might like based on what similar people like. And you know what, I often do like them!

Also by listening to my brother a lot recently (you can too on his MySpace) I have somehow got him listed on last.fm’s system and now his music can be recommended to others. The internet is great.