audioscrobbler.com

Just a few years ago, apart from word of mouth, we had pitifully few ways of finding new things to listen to. You could tune in to one or two national radio stations (some on AM only) in the vain hope you'd hear something interesting. Or perhaps thumb through a music rag on the offchance that a music journo had given an accurate review of something decent.

The web has changed all that. There are dozens of music review sites, hundreds ...
...record companies. You can read endlessly about music, listen to it, see pictures and videos of acts, download mp3s - free or paid-for - buy CDs new or second-hand. A whole world of music. All without moving from your keyboard.

It has broken the stranglehold of the traditional media, and hooray for that. But sometimes this brave new world is bewildering. Faced with such choice, where do you begin?

For many months, my ... more

Just a few years ago, apart from word of mouth, we had pitifully few ways of finding new things to listen to. You could tune in to one or two national radio stations (some on AM only) in the vain hope you'd hear something interesting. Or perhaps thumb through a music rag on the offchance that a music journo had given an accurate review of something decent.

The web has changed all that. There are dozens of music review sites, hundreds of online radio stations, sites run by fans, musicians, even record companies. You can read endlessly about music, listen to it, see pictures and videos of acts, download mp3s - free or paid-for - buy CDs new or second-hand. A whole world of music. All without moving from your keyboard.

It has broken the stranglehold of the traditional media, and hooray for that. But sometimes this brave new world is bewildering. Faced with such choice, where do you begin?

For many months, my starting point has often been the deliciously daftly-named Audioscrobbler (www.audioscrobbler.com). Via a free plug-in for your music player application (emphatically not spyware, they assure us), the site monitors what you listen to on your computer or portable device. It then builds a personal musical profile and uses this to create a 'neighbourhood' of users with similar tastes. By comparing your tastes with what your 'neighbours' play, Audioscrobbler suggests other music that you may like.

Audioscrobbler was born in November 2002 as a computer science degree dissertation project by Richard Jones, a Southampton University student. Gaining a couple of thousand users in its first months, it now has around 170,000, of which an average of about 60,000 are active at any one time. New users are currently joining at the rate of 2-3,000 per day.

It succeeds because it appeals to people's innate nosiness and vanity. I'm fascinated by others' musical taste and what it says about their personalities. Audioscrobbler offers all the guilty pleasure of leafing through someone's record collection, without the embarrassment of them coming back into the room just as you're laughing at their stash of David Essex CDs.

The site has a bare-bones simplicity, all done in line with the internet's original open-source, transparent ethos. But it's not without finesse.

The home page has nine navigation text links, consistent throughout the site. They are divided into 'techie' and music/community sections. If you're a user, you log in here. Apart from a search function (for artists or users), brief introductory text, a chart of the week's ten most popular tracks (nearly all Coldplay at the moment, sigh) and a box reporting any glitches, that's it.

Clicking your user name on the home page takes you to the heart of each person's user experience: the profile page. This lists basic personal information, a picture, and details of your operating system and plug-in. Your most recently-played tracks are displayed, as well as charts of your current favourite songs and your all-time most-played artistes. A click on your 'neighbourhood' link gives your 50 nearest musical neighbours, whose details, like those of any user, you can then explore.

Select the name of any track or artiste, and you are taken to a page showing their most popular tracks and their biggest fans on the site. A great feature is the link to search the excellent All Music Guide site for reviews and biographies of each act. So, within seconds of spotting an interesting new band on a neighbour's page, you can be pretty sure whether they're worthy of further investigation.

Community features are diverse, if not as fully integrated as on, say, Ciao. You can join, or set up, groups of varying degrees of exclusivity. These are mostly based on musical taste, but can conceivably cover anything - from geographical location to your computer operating system or your favourite comedy programme. The group Minions of Gorlax, for example, claims to be 'a caring community of forum fiends'.

The popular forums are themed around the groups, among many other subjects. Although I've only occasionally used this area of the site , it appears as obscure, inspired or plain dull as any other internet forum. You can add to your list of 'friends' any members to whom you take a shine. You can also do this with people you know in real life - in the unlikely event that you have a real life, that is.

Richard Jones likens the site's technology (called collaborative filtering) to that used by Amazon to suggest other products you might like. He says his system is better because it is based on what people really listen to, rather than just what they buy. Things you've bought and played once get less prominence. And, as he points out "On Amazon you might buy something as a present which doesn't represent your taste".

This is true, but in its method of recommending music, and in the choice of neighbours, Audioscrobbler exposes its central weakness: it assumes people's listening habits are uniform, rational and consistent, when most people's musical taste is incredibly eclectic. In fact, I suspect Audioscrobbler encourages people to listen more diversely in order to show off their wide-ranging tastes.

A possible negative effect of this is that your supposed neighbours often listen to things you actively dislike (that's not wholly bad: it's good to have your prejudices challenged and to explore new possibilities). But it throws up some real absurdities.

For instance, look on the page for the band Aztec Camera which was, effectively, a pseudonym for singer/songwriter Roddy Frame. Click the link for 'What artists are similar' and you'll get a list of 100 names ranked in order of 'similarity'. Roddy Frame is only number 100 in that list.

The site also suffers from the vagaries of people's spelling. If someone types a track as, say, Strawberry Feilds by The Beetles, band and track will be added to the database as completely new entities, rather than the true ones. Audioscrobbler's moderation system lessens the effects of this by enabling you to report variants on artist or track names. But there is room for improvement here.

Such flaws aside, the site has great commercial potential, and I'm sure it, or something very like it, will become central to our music buying and listening before long.

It has already spawned a sister site, Last FM, an online 'personalised' radio station which picks tracks according to your Audioscrobbler neighbours' tastes. Many users pay voluntary donations in return for a slightly enhanced service to help keep the sites afloat (although, strangely they won't accept payments of £1 a month or less).

If the money from that and limited advertising continues to flow, it looks certain to flourish. Whether it remains refreshingly democratic or takes on uneasy Big Brotherish overtones remains to be seen.

In the meantime I shall continue to enjoy the dozens of new acts I've discovered via Audioscrobbler. After all, where else would I ever have learned that there's a Chicago indie band arrestingly named the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir?

UPDATE: typically, within a few weeks of me writing this, Audioscrobbler disappeared. It has now been subsumed within the above-mentioned Last.fm. This is merely 'powered by audioscrobbler', although most of the features mentioned above do remain, and in a far more attractive format too.

(In the unlikely event that you want like to see what I've been listening to lately, go to http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/Bullhassocks). Oh, go on, laugh.
 

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