i think i listen to the same music too much.
i mean, it's not really a bad thing as such, as it's all music that i love dearly and gain large amounts of pleasure from listening to.
but the top ten bands/artists on my profile account for around 20% of my total plays. i've been using last fm for roughly a year, and the data tracked represents 99% accurate record of my listening habits. so i've spent 20% of my music listening time in the last year listening to one of ten artists.
this strikes me as a bit silly, really, especially as that list has largely been consistant for the entire time.
so i am embargoing them all for at least a week, and listening to other bands. i have hundreds and hundreds of CDs and i want to have my opinions challeneged on some of them by giving them more time.
someone should join with me in this.
I embargoed last fm completely
as my list looked nothing like my music collection at all and more of a snapshot that lasts way too long.
In saying that, i'm having twinges to get back into it!
When I listen to Radiohead
I turn the scrobbling machine off. Is this kinda the same?
Oh
No it's not. (Fails)
Probably me to be honest
Modest Mouse, Smashing Pumpkins and Tokyo Police Club are far too regular esp the former.
.
it is ridiculous how often some people listen to the same albums over and over again...i just have far too much music to listen to to let me do that.
i think chris has like 375 plays of the los campesinos album
chris who????
oops
i meant someone else. and i was exagerating. actually both daniel and jonny have listened to the album about 40 times each.
i cant believe that theres another chris :( :(
i have nearly 700 plays
of what amounts to 16 Los Campesinos! tracks.
i do tend to hammer albums completely - i have over 650 Of Montreal plays, about 80% of which is from Hissing Fauna; over 1000 Okkervil River plays, over 50% of which will be the 9 tracks on The Stage Names.
and it's not like I don't have fuckloads of music as well. i'm not really one for immediately latching onto music though...
i do think its good to have balance tho
theres a feeling that i get from listening to million dead that i'm never going to get from listening to a new band for the first time. then again, there's a feeling that i'll get from discovering something that i'll never get from listening to the 40-odd songs that they wrote. but yeah, a brief respite from the favourites is a good idea and will make you like them even more at the end. or make you realise that you don't need them and you'll move on, like a bird flying the nest
yeah
exactly :)
My flatmate ruined my charts last year
by playing the Travis album nonstop when I was on holiday. Forgot to turn it off.
You should have went into the recent tracks
and deleted them?
I didn't realise you could do that.
They are slowly getting pushed out of the top 5 by Mogwai Weezer and Belle and Sebastian.
Yeah
You can do it for anything you listened to in the last two weeks.
(Which is no help now!)
I like the idea of Last FM
but I dont have much music on my computer for it to scrobble so it would no where near be even cloe to a snap shot of what I listen to. Are there any other features to it that are good that don't involve the scrobbling and all that?
user uploadable events listings
so they're pretty extensive, and if somethings not on it you can add it
blogs that directly link to the records, gigs and bands that you talk about
tag radio - type in a genre or bad and it streams a bunch of songs that've been tagged with that phrase, or calculated as having similar listeners to the band
if you're in a band you can upload as much music as you want.
just general music based social networking web 2.0 stuffz
ahh cool cheers alcxxk
It looks like I should explore it more. and have a good play.
i'm trying to listen to as much music as possible
so it gets rid of patrick wolf being in the top 2, even though i haven't listened to him in about 2 years.
also
how can i get what i've played on my mp3 player to be scrobbled?
Yeah I'd also like to know if this is possible as I'd love to
have that scrobbled, as with that and my PC, it'd be a pretty accurate representation of what I listen to
http://www.last.fm/help/faq/
"iPod scrobbling" at the bottom.
i think it's only iPods at the moment, but there are plans to basically have every single way of listening to music scrobblable
there are user-created ones for a number of other players as well
as i understand it, the reason it works so well with ipods is because itunes records all this data anyway, so it's easy to access.
there was a programme for my old creative vision m, but because it recorded the number of plays but not the date/time they happened, the plugin would often get confused by the data and duplicate or ignore certain entries.
fascinating, eh?
i'm not sure it matters anymore though, as only apple seem to make large-capacity players these days :(
oh i thought it was a hardware thing
good thing i don't work in site user tech support, eh?
(this isn't sarcasm)
do you have a link to this please?
i have an ipod
hooray
but it's not working
boo
same
occasionally last.fm tells me my ipod has something new to scrobble but it is infact something I listened to about 10 minutes ago on the PC.
Apparently it only works if you have your entire itunes library on your ipod :/
i guess you should
just be glad you didn't have an account when you really liked ska punk lol?
that was robyn!
I liked all the good stuff. like placebo, and and the zutons. LOL!
OH YEAH
i'm thinking of your coheed & cambria thread but thinking the band was less than jake.
my top 10
barely changes but I think that's why the good people of last.fm brought in rolling charts for the previous 3,6 and 12 months. Looking at those gives me a far more clear indication of the music I listen to. If your feeling disheartened with your overall artists chart then rolling charts are but a simple satisfying click away : )
can you make them stick for display on your profile proper?
yeah
if you go to settings --> website --> display preferences
you can select there
thankyou
just stop listening to shit music, guntrip
Mine is skewed slightly
by the fact that I often leave (not so much now) music on when I go to sleep.
...
If the top ten bands on your profile didn't take up 20% of your total listening time, they wouldn't be your favourite bands, no?
Anyway, before I stopped caring about whether people viewing my Last.fm profile thought I was listening to too much of the same bands, I'd rectify it by switching Winamp to shuffle for a period of time.
Then I found that you could still skip tracks until it came up with something I wanted to hear. This led me to conclude that
a) Whatever happened, I'd still find myself, on the whole, listening to music I actually liked.
b) I can own many, many hundreds of CDs, but my taste in music still adheres to a rigid criteria. And the vast majority of this music satisfies one or more criterion, but only a proportion - say around 20% - satisfies most. And that will inevitably be the music I choose to listen to, during the few hours of that day that I find myself actually listening to anything.
c) People don't change.
So it comes down to: Do you want your profile to be eclectic (as far as your collection of Canadian guys with beards, acoustic guitars, problems with girls and an inability to escape from the prison of 4/4 meter allows) and fraudulent, or acurate and true?
Personally I'd prefer people knew my second favourite band is my own music, as opposed to them thinking that I listen to a wild variety of different music, some of which I might not actually like that much.
Anyway, I still listen to Winamp on random anyway, so I'm covered. Good luck with your soundtrack strategy.
"I listen to a wild variety of different music, some of which I might not actually like that much"
it's not really to do with that, it's more that i own close to a thousand CDs now and there are loads I've just never given much time to. i'm not really someone who instantly 'gets' music, f'rexample one of my favourite releases of last year was the Sunset Rubdown LP, and it didn't click with me until after five/six listens, when i totally fell in love with it.
i'm just wondering how many other albums that i have that i may end up totally adoring, but that i've never really given much of a chance to.
last fm is pretty irrelevent to this topic overall really. i only mentioned it as it was a shorthand into the subject for me. i think that's really how i find it useful, it causes me to react and think more about my listening habits.
i dont think this is about making his charts look any different
but about using his charts as a self regulating thing to try and properly get into more music.
ps: whenever daniel j guntrip listens to an album on his cd player, he also plays it on his computer with the sound down so that it scrobbles. we call this dedication.
truth
i'm listening to zen arcade now. i bought it a few months ago but i think i've only played it two or three times, which is clearly very silly of me.
my hero
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpcDj5tLnqA
Surely everybody does that?
I know I do. I also make a note of what I've played on my mp3 player so I can scrobble it later. I need my last.fm stats to be accurate man!
^5
...
That's retarded. Why doesn't he just get an iPod? It's only a 45 minute walk from his place to where they're freely available.
how would that help
with listening to music at home?
I don't understand last.fm.
How does work? Why would you listen to your albums on last.fm when you can listen to the CD?
you'd listen to them on last.fm
if you didn't have the tracks on your computer, or you wanted playlists of music invented for you to listen to that are statistically likely to appeal to you. or whatever.
for the most part though, the stuff that we talk about on here is about listening to mp3s, and the last.fm software uploading information about the tracks you listen to, keeping a record if you likke that sort of thing and recommending you music that you're likely to like, like.
people listen to music on their computers cos its easier than getting up and looking through your cd collection every time you want to listen to something different.
http://www.last.fm/help/
Thanks
It sounds like the type of thing I'd go mad for.
Statistics and lists FTW!
oh!
in that case i can't believe you're not already on it!
^ do it
I left it to scrobble a couple of thousand tracks before listening to 'your recommendations' this weekend, and they are, in the most, really really good.
Well worth installing it because it takes no effort whatsoever after that.
you can send a link to your profile to girls at bus stops
and they can see how cool your music taste is.
the site has really short urls
so you could easily cut it into your forearms and bleed your music taste all over her
i actually listen mostly to CDs
these days. i made a choice to switch back a few months ago. i quite enjoy flicking through my CD collection and sometimes things will just jump out at me that wouldn't have done from a directory listing. ANYWAY i have most of my CD collection encoded on my PC anyway for mp3 player uploadage, so i just run winamp in the background. WINNERrr.
HEY YOU SAID THAT UP THERE
crazy times.
This is turning me on a little.
SEXY
:D
I've decided a couple of months ago
to listen to every album I own in alphabetical order. I'm still at letter A as there's too many new things ( even if I rarely listen to a new album more than 10 times in the first few months after the release )
haha
i really want to do this sometime. but i'm put off by the knowledge that the first thing i'd have to listen to would be Hi Fi Serious by A, and the last Mary Star Of The Sea by Zwan...
get some 65daysofstatic in
of any other decent band starting with numbers - problem solved.
i file bands with numbers
phonetically. 65days are under s!
What about !!! ?
C
chk chk chk!
first one was
Aberfeldy - 'Young Forever'
Last one is probably by Zabrinski.
Says a lot about me, I suppose...
i love that Aberfeldy album!
it's so cute, with such a disturbing cover
disturbing ?
I tend to hammer artists and albums over periods of a month or two
problem is I don't really revisit them enough after that. So I'm trying actively to listen to more stuff less in the course of a month, and then move back to it.
that's a great idea
I might extend it to my top twenty. This will only really pinch with cLOUDEAD, Why?, Fugazi and MF Doom. Maybe I should go for the top thirty. Hmm.
my top artist accounts for 10% of my 30,000 plays
and the top 10 is probably around 50-60, im not bothered by this, if anything I wish I had time to listening to the bands I love more rather than trying to keep up with the neverending flow of new bands, its a balancing act I guess
i do consiously rotate my music listening
and think "well, i could listen to bright eyes and radiohead, but i always do that, so instead I'll choose something a bit like them but not them"
hangover = terrible grammar
Good idea I think
I did the same but just with my top two artists afte I realised I'd spent half a year listening jus to GBV and Pavement.
You realise this is the perfect time to
listen to 'Rock n' Roll Gangster' by Fieldy, right? MAKE IT SO, NUMBER 1.