Wednesday 28 June 2006

Pic of the day: Divine music? Perhaps not quite, but...

Last.fm (and my radio)

Hot on the heels of yesterday's talking computer program, here is one that plays music. Because there can never be too much sound in your life... Actually that's not how I feel at all. More about that another day, Light willing. Actually my life is filled with silence for the most part, and music in particular has been dwindling steadily for years now. Not having a best friend to introduce me to new music is part of it. Well, perhaps there is another way to find music? The radio is too random ... I end up turning it off pretty fast when on music channels. But I've recently seen several people I don't know recommend last.fm, a web site.

It is really called that, www.last.fm. When you first arrive, you can take it for a spin, but are generally encouraged to register for free and get your own account. Then you can download two different programs. One is a player that lets you play other people's favorites as if a no-talk music station on radio. (Thus the name FM, I assume.) The other is a plugin for your music player that registers what songs you already play, and updates your account with this information. This is used to rank melodies, but most important, you can use it to find similar music. And the more people who do this, the better the program gets at assessing what is "similar" and what is not.

You don't NEED to download the program that "phones home" if you are paranoid. You can simply download the radio part and listen to other people's music. I think. I haven't tried only doing that, but it should work. Let's say you start with a song or an artist you like, for instance Enya. If you don't like Enya then you are probably a bad or very disturbed person and not reading this. So you tune in on a station playing "similar artist radio" or an "artist fan radio". Depending on how similar it is, this music should also be good. Spool past any disappointing songs, mark any you particularly like with the heart icon, ban songs you never want to hear again no matter what. The system will learn from your choices.

Or you could try to get a friend. Like, me. Actually I don't have any last-fm friends, least of all with their own radio. But since I am now a paying member, I have my own radio. Once we are friends (possibly else too, I'm not sure) you can select my radio and play my songs. Most of them are ones I have played from my own CDs, but some are ones I have found by the "similar to" stations.

Not all of my songs are available. Last.fm has a large library, but not nearly all the world's music. Norwegian artists are naturally rare, and many Japanese are also missing. When I play a song, only the data about the song are phoned home to last.fm, not an actual rip of the song. Unless the recording company gives them the song, they have to buy it, and they will presumably do that with the most popular. So Enya is in, Nordstoga is out. Even so, Itlandm's Radio has quite a few hours of easy listening music now, and more is coming. For a while, until I get fed up with this too, and return to my silence. ("But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone; I'll be singing to you sweetly, from a window in the Tower of song." Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song.)

Once you have found a song or an artist, you can usually choose from several radio stations. There is always the "similar" and "fan" stations, but usually the fans have also "tagged" the songs, a less onerous word than "label" in this milieu, I suppose. So Enya is "New Age", "Celtic" and "Female Vocalist", among others. Depending on what trait of the song appeals to you, you can then choose a "tag station" to explore that trait further.

The site disappoints in a couple ways. Even after several days, the system has not calculated my neighbors. That is the people with the most similar music choices to me. This is the best part of last.fm, and it doesn't work. Boo. Not that this is surprising. If you have 100 000 users, then my choice of songs must be compared to 100 000. Now if I'm not the only one joining (and presumably I'm not) then each of them must also be compared to everyone. This is bound to get exponentially worse. I doubt they have the computing power to do this by raw force. They need smart algorithms, pattern-matching probably, and they may not have thought of that back when it was just 1000 or even 10 0000 people. Just giving it some time would have worked then.

The other problem is the clumsy user interface. I can't just send you a link to Itlandm's radio. Well, actually it is lastfm://user/Itlandm/personal, but I doubt you can get there, unless security is laid-back and lax. Feel free to try. In any case you would still need the lastfm player, since using lastfm:// instead of http:// will induce your web browser to launch the lastfm player rather than, say, Winamp or the built-in Windows Media Player. And you can't ask last.fm to play Dire Straits, for instance. You can ask it to play artists similar to Dire Straits, or the music of fans. But unless the fans all listen to nothing but Dire Straits, you won't hear much of them. This is consistent with the philosophy of the site, which is to expand your musical tastes, but it lowers its usefulness otherwise.

The site also has an exclusive deal with a legit downloading service (tunetribe, which offers better deals to artists than the big ones). It has some but not all that many of the songs. Hopefully if you get inspired to buy any other songs you hear, you can find them on your own. At least the site gives a wealth of details, which should help.

So, all in all, is this a good site? Oh yes. And it caters to non- Americans too, without having to lie. Always a good thing. Also, this is the first time you get to hear what kind of music Itlandm listens to. When he listens to music at all, but I already said that was for another day, if any.