Trying last.fm Kindof a cool idea in general but it has one weakness that might kill it for me.
I have a lot of, I’m not sure what to call it, “Junk” audio on my iPod. Stuff that I like and listen to but that would not be interesting to many other people and would not help link my taste to others. Let me give you some examples.
I create my own music as a hobby and I have a lot of unfinished stuff, and alternate versions on my iPod. It’s part of the process. I start stuff, I load it on my iPod and listen to it over and over trying to figure out if I like it, if it’s any good, what should I change, etc. Those tracks have a lot of listens and they’re not available to anyone else.
I have a lot of weird novelty audio that I pick up at random places on the web such as the recent nasty recording of what’s-his-face, Baldwin, to his daughter, and various remixes people have made incorporating that audio. What’s the proper artist and album name for that?
There’s an LA radio personality, April Winchell that collects this kind of stuff on her blog. Well, I’ve downloaded a lot of that and it’s on my iPod with “April Winchell” as the artist and in a lot of cases I don’t even know who’s recorded this stuff. How likely will those tracks be to match anyone else?
I have a bunch of recordings of “numbers stations” that I downloaded from various sources.
I have a bunch of prank phone calls from different locations on the web.
I used to record a local college radio show “My Make Out party” run by a woman who went by the name DJ Whisper. I liked the music she played but also I got a kick out of her voice which was so high pitched I pictured her with a tennis ball sized head. Well, I’d often edit out the songs and just keep her voice as tracks on my iPod so that every now and then as I’m listening to music DJ whisper comes on to announce tracks that are all wrong.
What good is it to scrobble any of these?
So after a couple of weeks of scrobbling I’m finding this kind of stuff appearing as some of my most played tracks which I’m sure only interferes with the process of finding other users with similar interests to get recommendations from.
In one case I made up an artist name just to keep a bunch of similar audio clips together and the artist name I chose happens to match the name of an artist on Last.FM and so now it looks like he’s one of my favorite artists and I’m one of his biggest fans.
So the feature I really need in Last.FM is the ability to blacklist certain artists, genres, tracks, or something to tell Last.FM not to bother scrobbling this stuff. I know I have an opportunity with each scrobble to remove tracks but, I don’t want to do something – over and over again – that could easily be done one time.
Meanwhile, while it lasts, you can find my account on Last.FM here.