Aditya Shevade

Bored of the Same Music? Read On

Have you ever been so bored of listening to the same music again and again that you planned to secretly start a band and compose your own music and launch an album? Okay, that’s a little extreme I agree, but listening to the same music gets boring more often than not for me. Except in case of classics of course.

This was of course before the time I created an account on Last.fm. Last.fm is a UK based Internet radio system. We are not interested in the radio part for this article. Here, I will review the Audioscrobbler of Last.fm. It’s a service which resides on your system and caches the tracks you listen to (that is of course if you tag and organize your music, which I do). When you are connected to the Internet, the program transfers the stats to your Last.fm account. Then, based on the tracks you listen a lot and don’t listen much (or never listen to), your radio listening habits and stats gathered from your portable devices (like the iPhone), the service recommends new music for you. It also builds a relationship between users giving an information about the similar artists the users like and offers many other social networking features.

Recommendations are calculated using a collaborative filtering algorithm so users can browse and listen to 30 second previews of a list of artists which are recommended. The page also lists music that has been directly recommended to the user by peers and music from the groups the user belongs to, journals written by other users about some artists the user listens to, and other users who have listened to similar music recently. Last.fm also allows users to manually recommend specific artists, songs or albums to other users on their friends list or groups they belong to.

I have found numerous new music tracks and albums via this way and the recommendation of Poets of the Fall in particular has stuck like nothing else. So, if you are, like me, bored with the same music, head over to Last.fm, create an account and start scrobbling… (don’t forget to add me as a friend )

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Posted in: Music

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 11:35 and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.