The Wily Filipino

In Praise of Last.fm.

I am absolutely loving Last.fm. I've added a "weekly chart" graphic to the bottom right of this webpage, which is precisely what Last.fm has done for me (for free!) since April 2004: keep track of the 68,800 songs I've played (as of today) on my computer. My Last.fm page tells me, for instance, that Guided By Voices is my top artist (no surprise, with 2,319 plays), and that PUFFY's "Long Beach Nightmare" is my most-played song (99 times in almost two years). (Though Izzy is actually the one who listens to PUFFY somewhat obsessively, which makes Teenage Fanclub's "Ain't That Enough" the highest non-PUFFY song on the list.)

One of the coolest features is Last.fm radio, which plays songs listened to by your "musical neighbours" -- in this case, music that's already weighted according to your own musical interests. It seems to work a lot better than Pandora's somewhat arcane "musical genome" system, as if I listened to, say, Tom Waits for his "repetitive melodic phrasing" and "major key tonality." Songs kind of function the same way: My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow" gave me Elastica's "Car Song," Stereolab's "Brittle," and "Falling Back" by California Oranges, which sounded nothing like the previous songs. Pandora wins the interface battle, however, since it uses Flash and plays in your browser. Last.fm, however, gives you more control: you can download plugins for pretty much every major music software program out there, but the Last.fm player is again a separate download.

And if you're a Last.fm subscriber, one of your bonus features is a personal radio -- one that plays a random selection of any of the 68,000-odd songs I've ever played (provided they're on Last.fm's streaming server). A listen to my own radio was quite satisfying, if a rather schizophrenic one -- Augustus Pablo, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Duran Duran, HYDE, Oingo Boingo, Os Mutantes, Warren Miller, Dillinger, Icehouse and PJ Harvey were the first 10 tracks. But one could play, for instance, Largehearted Boy's radio, and hear Neko Case, Elf Power, the Continental Co-Ets, Portastatic and Windsor for the Derby, in that order, and get something more stylistically coherent. (J-Lu's radio yielded Utada Hikaru, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Eraserheads (!), Glay, and L'Arc~en~Ciel; Smoothie's radio played the Alkaline Trio, HORSE the Band, Interpol, Nine Inch Nails, and the Juliana Theory.)

The "Similar Artists Radio" works pretty successfully too: the "Puffy" radio appropriately plays both sugary-sweet J-pop and J-punk from the Benten label. Typing in "John Zorn" -- someone whose work is all over the map -- queues up Otomo Yoshihide, Marc Ribot, the Fantomas Melvins Big Band, Ground Zero and Praxis. (Something wrong there, I think, as it represents only a certain aspect of Zorn's work, but typing in "Masada" got me closer to what I wanted -- Wadada Leo Smith, more Ribot, etc.) In an attempt to stump the player, I typed in "Eraserheads," and it told me that there was not enough content to play this station -- though the results happily displayed Siakol, Bamboo, Mayonnaise, and Parokya ni Edgar, among others.

The process isn't perfect. There are various server outages, which is probably to be expected, given all the data processing going on; the tags are also mostly dependent on the individual playing the music, so improperly-tagged music usually shows up on the site. But it's a fantastic site nonetheless, and I encourage you folks who use iTunes, or Winamp (or whatever else you use to play music on your computer -- I don't own a stereo, so my computer is it), to download the plugin and get hooked.

Posted by the wily filipino at February 11, 2006 06:21 PM