The social side of music
I am pleased to have recently discovered a couple of “social music” sites: last.fm and musicmobs. Both sites track your listening habits via your computer’s media player. In the case of last.fm this is done with an audioscrobbler plugin; musicmobs has its own system which seems to prefer iTunes, but there are alternative plugins and scripts for other media players. I happen to be using Amarok as my media player, which comes bundled with the audioscrobbler plugin for last.fm, and there are audioscrobbler plugins available for many players and platforms. Of the two sites, I prefer last.fm because it updates my listening stats as I’m listening; musicmobs requires me to run a script manually.
So, what’s so social about last.fm? I’ve only been using it for a few weeks (see my user page), but in that time there have been major feature upgrades. The basic features when I signed up include:
- charts: tracks, artists, albums
- neighbors: a list of people who have similar musical tastes
- tags: tag tracks, artists, and albums
- similar artists: when browsing an artist’s page, see a list of similar artists
- Top fans: when browsing an artist/track/album page, see a list of that item’s biggest fans
- groups: based on musical interest
- journal: write something!
- radio station: Internet radio stations that play the music you like
Recent updates include:
- Shoutbox: leave a message on a user/track/artist/album page
- Wiki: contribute to an artists profile
- Music previews: when browsing a track page, you might see a media player embedded in the page that plays either a selection or the whole track!
I really enjoy seeing what other music people that listen to the same music I listen to listen to. (That sounds funny–I mean my neighbors are folks that listen to similar music, but there are obviously differences. We don’t listen to exactly the same music.) Like most of the world, I don’t have much of an opportunity to hear good, new music–thanks, commercial radio! Lately my sources for finding new music have been World Cafe (public radio), Austin City Limits, and KGSR radio out of Austin. (The last couple of years I’ve bought their Broadcasts CD, which benefits the SIMS Foundation–great stuff.) The idea that I can now preview music right in last.fm, without having to go to amazon.com or some other site and try to figure out how to play previews in linux, well, it’s just so nice!
February 17th, 2006 - 6:50 am
Thanks for the Musicmobs link! It might be worth mentioning that the main differentiator between Last.fm and Musicmobs is that with Musicmobs, you can post your playlists and other people can pull playlists down from the site and rebuild them in their own library using Mobster. Of course that doesn’t do you a lot of good since you’re using Amarok, but for Mac and Windows users, it’s significant. We don’t have a Linux developer at the moment, but I’d love to work with someone to help get Amarok up to speed. Any takers?
February 23rd, 2006 - 9:41 am
Toby, thanks for pointing out the playlist feature for Musicmobs. Again, since I’m using linux, I can’t seem to upload or utilize other members’ playlists. I tried looking at the playlist format and googled to find an app that would export a playlist in that format but no joy. Now if Musicmobs would let me listen to playlists without having to buy the actual music and have it on my computer, that would be cool!
The script I’ve been using to u/l data to Musicmobs is unfortunately failing now with what I believe is a utf encoding error. I notice that Musicmobs doesn’t like my tags that contain accents and that those accented characters are removed. So instead of listening to Chávez Ravine I listen to Chvez Ravine.