last
A couple of weeks ago Wil Wheaton went on a bit of a ramble about how much he was enjoying last.fm, another one of those Web 2.0 sites with a kind of stupid name, a widget to put in your site’s sidebar, a little client program to download, and a new silly made-up word or two.
I listened to his enthusiasm, accepted that he liked it, and then naturally assumed it was great for him and not for me, because whenever I hear someone talk about anything music-related, I naturally assume it applies to other people’s tastes in music and not to mine. Classic heavy metal and hard rock is a narrow, narrow field, and some of my favorite bands are so esoteric that they generally cause music software to start talking in a shrill voice and belching smoke, kind of like when Captain Kirk throws a whole lot of unsolvable dilemmas at a fascistic planet-controlling computer built by a long-dead ancient race.
For one reason or another, I eventually decided to give it a whirl — probably because I was a little unhinged after having to spend that one extra hour pulling HTML markup out of a poorly-designed PHP class. And the results were much more interesting than I expected.
For those not yet aware of last.fm, it is a web application that’s entirely free at which you set up an account and then begin building up a profile by listening to music on the media player of your choice, as well as listening to last.fm’s streaming “radio”, which tailors the songs to either a keyword you punch in, or an artist you punch in. The app monitors what you play, makes note of it, allows you to love or hate tracks as they’re played, and thereby build up a kind of matrix of your listening tastes by corellating them with the tastes of others who like similar stuff.
Now, none of this should sound new. The concept of building up recommendations based on the choices of others who like the same things you do is as old as the h1 tag. Amazon.com has done it for years. But I’ve always found that these types of recommendation-building engines are very flawed. Amazon.com, for example, makes some horrendous recommendations to me with both books and music, to such and extent that I simply don’t bother to look anymore. And Netflix? WTF?
Because my tastes in music are about as fashionable and popular as leg warmers, I decided to throw some of my more obscure favorites at the last.fm player just to see how much it would choke. 80s heavy metal Hawaiians Sacred Rite were first out of the gate, one of my mostest bestest bands but which precious few could possibly know. As mentioned, last.fm has a type of streaming radio which you can play either through their website, or through a little player you can download, and each “station” is built on the fly to play music based on a keyword you type in (like “female fronted beauty and the beast gothic stained black metal”) or a band. Type in your selection, hit play, and see if anything comes up … and when it does, if it’s even remotely going to be like what you consider a similar type of music to your input.
When I typed in Sacred Rite and punched Play, I assumed that one of two things would happen. That a) last.fm would stare at me blankly and tell me it didn’t have a clue who the fuck I was talking about, or b) it would play music that was horrifically inappropriate, like Linkin Park.
To my surprise, neither occurred. Instead, last.fm happily accepted my selection, acknowledging their existence, and proceeded to play what little it had in its database of licensed music that was, all things considered, not too far afield at all. Musical styles are always a combination of genre and period, so if last.fm had started spewing out very recent music — even which otherwise might qualify as traditional heavy metal — I would have been disappointed. But it managed to cough up related music that was more or less contemporary and more or less stylistically similar to what is — let’s face it — a very obscure band in the broad scheme of things.
The whole key to last.fm’s flexibility is, I think, the fact that it records everything you play on your computer, not just what you play via their streaming radio (they call this feature, rather stupidly, “scrobbling”). Thankfully, this means that you’re not limited only to what they have in their licensed catalogue, but can still interact with their system and get some benefits out of it. Over the last week or so I’ve been flitting back and forth during my computer workday between playing stuff in my own collection, and popping into the streaming radio feature to see what it can come up with, and by and large what it’s giving me is fairly sensible and fairly shrewd, and most of the time its selections are in keeping with what I consider aesthetically similar music to whatever I’ve punched in. On the few occasions where a horrible gaffe is made (because, say, there are two artists in existence with a certain name associated with the style I’m listening to and last.fm spits out the wrong one), I simply click on the “ban” button and last.fm is suitably chastened.
Now, Sacred Rite is not in last.fm’s radio, unsurprisingly. But a few other somewhat surprising esoteric artists in the same mold are, and I was somewhat pleased when last.fm pulled out a track from Omen, a track from Savatage, and then some more mainstream but not at all unreasonable stuff from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. They say they are constantly adding music to their radio database, of which I have no doubt, but what’s there already is not too shabby at all.
In the end, the key to the software’s strength is that its knowledge of music and its ability to learn about tastes from what people are playing is not limited to what is in its own bank of licensed music. Without that feature, I think last.fm would be just another lame example of a “Recommendations” engine, good for a moment or two of tittering laughter, and little more. Instead, even with someone with tastes as specific as mine, you stand to find your musical self at least acceptably well represented. I’d give it a shot.
Oh, and where would a Web 2.0 app be without a nifty little widget to stick in your site’s sidebar? You can probably see one now on my own sidebar, and with it you now have the power to see what I’ve been listening to recently, and point, and laugh, and say, “My word, but the man has silly taste — is he actually listening to music?”