Holy crap, last.fm

After thinking yesterday and for a while today about my last.fm music taste exposure, I decided to visit the site and actually spend some time there for the first time since freshman year. last.fm, formally AudioScrobbler, is basically a plug-in that you install on your computer that tracks every single audio track that you play, and uploads the information to your personal "Dashboard". Here, when you visit, you can find not only a list of what songs you've been listening to lately, but also a ridiculous amount of statistical data, providing you with your top albums, tracks and artists on a weekly, monthly, yearly, or all-time basis. For example, during the week of June 12, 2006, my top three artists were The Velvet Teen, Kaki King, and Stereolab. So it's crazy.

When I first signed up for AudioScrobbler freshman or sophomore year, that's pretty much all the site was-- interesting to look at, fun to stalk friends with, but not very helpful otherwise. Visiting today, however, it's clear there's a whole lot more going on now than I ever even thought possible. In addition to being able to view your "musical neighbors" (those users who have similar musical tastes), you can listen to your own personal music station made up of tracks and artists relating to those you spend a lot of time listening to (kind of like Pandora, but I think a lot more accurate as it makes its recommendations basted on everything you've ever listened to), see what songs your friends are listening to right now, and make personal recommendations to friends and musical neighbors that they see when they log onto the site. What stunned me more than these developments, however, was the sheer amount of information available about artists and tracks. Now, if you click on a particular artist in your list of recent tracks, you're taking to their last.fm artist page which provides a short artist bio, 30-second clips of 4 tracks, a list of the artist's most popular songs, a list of the artist's top last.fm listeners, a list of total artist tracks played by last.fm listeners, and even "shout-outs" and comments about the artists from last.fm users. The artist page also lists about 6 similar artists and a number of user-created groups centering on musical styles, with names like "Chillosophy" and "After the Post Rock".

Basically, this site is nuts, and perhaps an even greater time waster than the facebook. Not only can you stalk your friends through their musical preferences, but you can also stalk yourself and find out about all the things you should be listening to. It seems pretty obvious to me that last.fm took a lot of user feedback into consideration when expanding the site to its present state; I feel like the developments that have been made since I first signed up in 2004 are so fantastic that they could only be the product of the input of a very large number of people (authorship, anyone?).

If any of you sign up, you should post your username as a comment to this post so that we can be friends!