Where Worlds Collide

I’m still spending far too much time listening to last.fm, but I think I’ve discovered a flaw.

I’ve been listening to last.fm’s Radio ‘Spill, which initially came up with an eclectic mix of music, but subsequently degenerated into playing the same dozen or so artists over and over again. You can get very sick of Cornershop’s “Brimful of Ahsa” after a while.

I think I’ve realised what’s been happening; too many people were listening to the group radio station and were scrobbling at the same time; the result was that over time people’s last.fm libraries got homogenised. And a random selection of songs, some by quite obscure artists, that just happened to get played to a lot of different people in a short space of time went high up the group chart and thus got served up to everyone else. And so long as people kept scrobbling while listening to streaming radio, those songs got into more and more libraries and got served up more and more.

I think the solution is to scrobble only when I’m playing CDs, not when streaming.

Being from the Guardian’s Readers Recommend community, Radio ‘Spill seems to be heavily biased towards 60s r’n'b and scratchy 80s post-punk anyway, neither of which are really my kind of music. My attempts to educate the Guardian readers into the delights of Breathing Space, Panic Room and The Reasoning don’t seem to have borne much fruit.

As as for those bands that haven’t put any of their music on last.fm at all, thus missing out on a chance to get their music heard - Odin Dragonfly, I’m looking at you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.