For years I worked in silence, then I discovered Shoutcast.com and Winamp. Shoutcast changed my listening habits greatly–you can choose from dozens of stations where the task of finding new music is left to the DJ. Shoutcast was perfect until Last.fm showed up. With Shoutcast you can change the station, but you can’t skip songs. If you’re listening to music while you’re working, the station changing process can become tedious. Last.fm changes this. Instead, you get your own personal station that learns to play only the music that you love. For me at least the result is an enjoyable, rich musical experience.
In my short life I’ve probably seen/heard at least a thousand live bands perform, mostly in Gainesville, Los Angeles, and Austin. Most of the time you’ve got a singer, a drummer, and a bass player…a surprisingly boring formula. When I go out I’m usually not going for the music, instead I choose the venue, then the music comes to me. My one exception is Spontane.
What is sometimes slightly more entertaining than the music: the followers, especially when they have an attitude to match the music. So here’s the theory: if you like the band, you’ll also like the people that like the band, and so on. Essentially what you get is a personalized nomadic social network that mobilizes on schedule from venue to venue. When the social network reaches critical mass and significantly distinguishes itself from other social networks, then you have yourself a real “Pied Piper” situation. Last.fm challenges or possibly even negates the “rockstar”. The scene fractures…
As Last.fm learns about you, it composes a list of musical neighbors. These are users with musical tastes similar to yours. What you get is an algorithmically generated, music preference centric, readymade social mosaic, to ignore or engage–it’s entirely up to you. This is the stuff of the new attention economy–musical attention becomes more liquid. If we can have music neighborhoods, surely we can also have reading neighborhoods. So far none of my Last.fm neighbors have contacted me. Despite the popularity of Last.fm, when I look in my music neighborhood there aren’t many people that share my music preferences, but this post could change that quickly. How big is your Last.fm neighborhood?
What did I listen to before Last.fm and Shoutcast? In the early 1990’s I was already listening to Amiga music modules downloaded from local BBS. I was the sysop of Zap! BBS which had hundreds of games and utils up for download, also I put up a small collection of Amiga .MOD music files. Then I joined the ABC or “Boca Amiga Club” where I met several local musicians using trackers to compose music–it was amazing what the Amiga was capable of. In 1992 the Amiga was already a professional multimedia production computer. I was blown away by the quality of the audio, my PC was put to shame. After discovering the ABC, new musicians joined my BBS and uploaded/downloaded new music–some of them were students at FAU that had access to the internet (before it was available to the public) so I had rare .MOD’s that were hard to find.
College was different–my friends were making music, buying records, performing at house parties and downtown clubs. There was plenty to choose from: hiphop, triphop, britpop, jungle, trance, drumnbass… By the time Napster came out my music needs had already been met by Shoutcast–I never fell into the P2P trap. What do I listen to now? Generally speaking I listen to “contemporary non-vocal electronic music” a description I just pulled from Expanding Records. When I say “electronic” music, that doesn’t tell you much–there’s dance, trance, techno, house, space, drone…none of which I listen to. What I do like you could tag as ambient, downtempo, or idm, but that’s not really important. What is important is that Last.fm knows what I like.
Last.fm runs through a huge master database of listening activity and munches on that with a complex algorithm to choose the best music for me, saving me time. If you don’t like a song you can ban it, so you never hear that song again (although I accidentally banned a good song once, so the UI might need some work.) When we ban a songs, Last.fm learns. Over time the entire system gets smarter and smarter, almost like that wild computer from the movie “War Games”.
At home I’m usually working on the computer. I’ve found that vocals are very distracting when I’m working. Last.fm knows this and plays mostly the non-vocal abstract electronic music that I like. When I hear an especially good track I can click a few links and go right to the source. On that note, I was just clicking around tonight and found some very good music at Toytronic and at Expanding Records, so I decided to add these links to my blog for safekeeping.