Okay, so there are tons of charts, tools and "eccentricity" calculators out there for your last.fm charts (fruits of an open API), but this is far and away my favorite. even if it does confuse logotypes with logos. And even if it's top-down, as far as what logos are included 1 . And even though my new found love for invisible oranges means that most of my top metal bands don't have logos.

As far as logos vs. logotypes, while the chart (left) does stack neatly, logos are what you see on the right. they're the sort of thing that used to populate my notebooks in gradeschool. I can't complain, because it's still a badass tool, much as the inclusion of that really ancient queensryche logotype annoys me. ah well. via the last.fm blog.

1. like including ISIS, but not tool, WTF?

• case 1 - virb.com: since signing up, i have been bombarded by friend requests from bands, and have visited their pages to find customized pages and music samples. this is one part of the myspace experience. although it's been championed by the grown up myspace haters for it's visual panache, it's not something i want a part of.
• case 2 - facebook.com: since signing up, i have been plunged into old friendships that have been buried by time and distance. it's the same experience i had when i added my real name to my myspace profile. except with less blinking text, annoying music, and ugly slideshows.
• using the 'posted items' feature on facebook led me to understand which sites value my presence there, via the meta description tag on my profile pages:
  • case 1 - Last.fm:
    

    Listen to sunburntkamel’s personal radio station (17,480 tracks played). sunburntkamel’s top artists: dredg, Cursive, In Flames, Hot Water Music, The Appleseed Cast, Opeth. Favourite tags are seen live, emo, Progressive rock. Get your own music profile at Last.fm, the world’s largest social music platform.

  • case 2 - flickr:
    

    Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos to the world, securely and privately show photos to your friends and family, or blog the photos you take with a cameraphone.

  for flickr, i am an advertising vehicle. last.fm does their advertising in the description of their home page, not my profile:

  The world's largest social music platform. Show off your taste, see what your friends are listening to, hear new music, get personal radio, recommendations, and downloads, all for free.

  can you guess which site's persuaded me to support their efforts?

Last.fm just brought their new site out of beta, and it is completely awesome. aside from just solving my media center extender issue, it looks fantastic, and gets me my fix of album art. But every time i mention last.fm to one of my web savvy friends, they start going on about how they "use pandora, and that's the same/better, right?". It's not.

Service

Pandora is based on the music genome project. The fundamental assumption is that if an expert can describe the discreet elements of most pieces of music, logic can use those elements to find other, similar music, that will be enjoyable to the people who like the original piece of music.

Last.fm is built on those trendy Web 2.0™ ideas: the long tail, tagging, and user profiles. The assumption is that like-minded (people using the same tags, listening to the same music) people will like similar music. so last.fm doesn't set out to describe music at all, just graph trends of who listens to what, and what tags they use to describe it.

Both sites provide a nice web-based music player. Both players pretty well suck at doing "What bands sound like Hot Water Music?" The only music I've found through either radio player, i found through last.fm's 'recommendation radio'. That service only works for people who have an account, and submit tracks to it. As a service, as much as i think letting 'experts' tell you what you should like is a bad idea, right now it doesn't do a whole lot worse.

Scene

Amid recent debate over the future of the music industry, there's mention of music scenes moving out of local record stores. The scene, which in loose terms means 'the way people discover, share, appreciate, and acquire new music', is not moving to pandora. it is moving to myspace, mp3 blogs, and last.fm. Why last.fm and not pandora?

I have a profile on last.fm. I write journals, it shows people what I listen to, What I tag, and who i go to shows with. The music i've found on last.fm that i really like, i find through other profiles. I read someone's journal about their favorite metal vocalists (recommended to me because she included Mikael Åkerfeldt ), and found out about Ulver, whose brilliant 'Blood Inside' is now one of my favorite albums. When I first joined the site, i listened to 800 tracks the first week, just so i could have the 'neighbors' feature. when they showed up, I visited all their profiles, and found out they were all listening to Stars, and I wasn't.

This is the sort of stuff that happens at small record stores, and at shows. last.fm and myspace are becoming places for it to happen online, without geographic necessity, and without the sort of condescention you'd normally endure from an indie kid when you haven't heard of the new cool bands.

The Long Tail

Pandora's idea of music experts is not new. Nor is last.fm's idea of finding music from people around you. Pandora's top-down model is the same model as radio, record labels, MTV, and american idol. It's not that liking pop is bad. I've certainly had some 'uncool' taste at times. But liking pop because you've been told it's 'better' is bad. Last.fm's model is the same one as making mix tapes, going to shows, and hanging out in record stores. do yourself a favor.