People like to talk about their music preferences. We all have at some point of time have had a heated debate about who your favorite band is, or which Pink Floyd album is the best one. Every time we come across a piece of music or soundtrack that we like, we wish someone could tell us who composed that track, or at least the name of that track. We all spend countless hours scouring through our and our friends music collection searching for that one elusive artist/song/album.
What is evident from the above is the fact that social networking plays an important role in people finding the music of their preference. What if we had a social networking system that was built for this very specific purpose of finding and recommending music? A place where people can share their music preferences and in the process open other people’s eyes to music they never thought existed!!!
This is where last.fm.com comes into the picture. Last.fm.com claims to be a ‘social revolution in music’. Using a recommender system called Audioscrobbler, last.fm builds a profile of the musical tastes of every user by keeping track of all the music listens to, be it music streaming onto his machine from a remote url, or a mp3 playing on his local media player. Last.fm also offers the user an option to add other last.fm users to his ‘friends-list’. All this information is then fed into the last.fm database, where it is compared to data from other last.fm users. This throws up recommendations made by other people who have been listening to similar music which can be seen and played by the user through his profile page. Last.fm also offers other social networking features.
History:
Audioscrobbler, the recommender system behind last.fm was the brainchild of Richard Jones. What began as a computer science project at University of Southampton, UK, blossomed into a popular music recommendation service? Last.fm was fully integrated with Audioscrobbler in 2003 and in 2007; CBS bought last.fm for £140 million.
Users on Last.fm:
To use last.fm, a user has to first sign up for an account with them. Registered users can then download and install one of the last.fm plug-ins. These plug-ins are used to record the names of all the sound tracks which the user is listening to on his local machine (they call this automatic track logging scrobbling). This information is then sent back to the last.fm server, which feeds it into the Audioscrobbler recommender engine, which calculates recommendations for that user.Every registered user has a personal profile page which lists his musical preferences and the music he has been listening to recently. In addition to this, the user also can access a feature called dashboard, which shows the recommendations calculated by Audioscrobbler. User can preview and listen to tracks from the dashboard, which might not be in his/her profile.
Tagging:
Users are also allowed to tag their music, and they can search last.fm catalogue for music that has been tagged in a certain way. Tagging can be by genre, mood, artist, or any other characteristic.
Charts:
Last.fm also generates charts which indicate the popularity of a track/artist/album which a user has in his profile. So by looking at these charts, a user can determine the popularity of the music he is listening to and also the general music preferences of his peers in his social networking community. In addition to personal music charts, last.fm also generates weekly global charts, which indicate the overall music tastes of the entire last.fm user base.
When compared to commercial music charts which are based on the number of sales of a particular album, last.fm charts reflect on the actual music people are listening to.
So, how good is last.fm?
To answer this question, I setup an account with last.fm (search for user ‘zarthos’, that’s my profile name on last.fm). I then queued up 1001 tracks of my favorite artists on Winamp. By installing the winamp-plugin for last.fm, I had my winamp hooked up with Audioscrobbler to record all my musical preferences. I then let winamp play these tracks for 3 days. Parallel to this effort, I also installed the last.fm software on another machine, where I was playing and rating all tracks belonging to the artist Audioslave.
After a few days, I decided to check up on the recommendations last.fm could offer me based on the data I had fed it over the past few days. The results were satisfying for my taste and musical preference. Some of the artists I was recommended were RHCP, Eagles, Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton. What is interesting to note here is that not only does last.fm give me these recommendations, but it also gives me the name of the user who made that recommendation. This way I can now find people who have similar music tastes. Sometimes these recommendations are weird to say the least (I was recommended Slipknot once), but then can go and lookup up that person’s profile to determine why he made that recommendation. When u makes a recommendation to someone, you also have the option to give an explanation behind your recommendation, which can be very useful to people who are exploring new musical avenues.
My next experiment with last.fm will be to feed it with different types of music and see what recommendations it comes up with. I also have yet to explore a lot of its social networking features, which might help me better understand the workings of Audioscrobbler. Come back next week for more on Audioscrobbler and last.fm. Also don’t forget to leave a comment or two on what you think about Audioscrobbler and any ideas as to how I can better explore this recommender system.
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