Last FM

I've been using this for the last few weeks, and am finding it quite fun. For anyone who doesn't know, it's just another silly time wasting social networking site, but based completely around music. You download a little jobber that monitors winamp or whatever you're using to play music on your computer, and it compiles everything you listen to, so everyone can see how cool you are. Or at least it would if I had any friends.

First up, in a lot of ways, this system is pretty fucking stupid. It doesn't differentiate between the length of tracks, so each track represents one 'tally' for that band. Thus a band that you listen to occasionally will jump to the top of your 'favourite' artists purely on the merit of them having lots of short songs on an album, while a band with long songs, or perhaps an unindexed live performance will only earn that band a couple of tallys. It's pretty stupid, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere.

What I really like about the service though, is the countless reccomendations it has given me. This is perfect for bands I really like that might have only released one or two albums: I can simply have a peak at who sounds like them, and get into a whole new slew of bands. Since this all seems to be user updated, you find some surprisingly esoteric stuff. And on top of that, I dig the statistics angle. It's nice to see a personalised 'chart' of what you've been listening to. Makes me wish I'd started using this from first year onwards. It's so much better than myspace for finding music, because you can find slightly older bands (and really really old bands, like Tim music) knocking around too.

Anyways is anyone else using this? My page on lastfm can be found here, so you can have a look at how much better my taste in music is than yours D:D:D: