301: A scrobble babble rabble (in a puddle with a poodle).

If I could have three wishes the first would be that everyone else was as into last.fm as I am.  (For the completists amongst you the second wish would be for some new shoes, and the third would be to provide Coca Cola to every child on earth.)  Last.fm is utterly, entirely and indeed completely pointless.  It serves no use as a social networking tool, has little marketing value, and there is next to nothing to do on it.  I listen to music on WinAmp or Spotify and last.fm “scrobbles” it, i.e. keeps an exhaustive list of all the music I listen to.  My listening habits can then be viewed in a variety of different lists, charts and graphs.  God, I love Last.fm; it is the obsessive-compulsive’s dream.  I’m going to give each band name in this post a link to a relevant YouTube video; you can thank me later.

For instance I can confidently tell you that the first song I listened to after joining last.fm was Saddest by Drumcorps (spotify link and YouTube link).  That was on the 6^th October 2007; since then I have listened 14,671 songs on my computer.  In the last three months I have listened to Guns n Roses 79 times, Snoop Dogg 36 times, and Mungo Jerry once.  If only I could scrobble from YouTube then I would be even closer to perfect happiness.  In the last week I have listened to Pink Floyd 13 times (cos I iz goin 2 c Rgr Wtrz ply da Wall 2nite), Danzig eleven times, and Credit to the Nation once.  In the last year I’ve listened to Frank Sidebottom 143 times, Frank Zappa 66 times, Frank Chickens 14 times, Frankie Knuckles eight times, and Frank Sinatra three times.  Isn’t it great to know these things?

Generated on May 22 2011 - My Music Habits

 

Many other web- and people-places are trying to get in on the act of indulging my imaginary OCD, by 
creating extra ways of visualising my music listening habits.  Here is a pointless collection of some.  Oscar Wilde said all art is pointless.  I've also found out here that the average age of my neighbours (i.e. people with very similar music tastes) is 26; they are also all male.  Doesn’t this arrangement of charts and graphs look beautiful?  No, of course not; it's awful.  Most of the graph/chart generators are put together by piss-poor hobby programmers, and most don't even work.  So this is what I'm left with; three ugly boxes that don't play nicely.


Anyhoo, time to step out into the real world.  It’s Friday (Friday, gotta get down on Friday) and Roger Waters is playing The Wall live at Manchester’s MEN Arena (fun, fun, fun, fun).  Must I explain further?  No, I did that the other day... erm... right... I’m off.  Bye.


Oh, one last thing.  Two artists I enjoy scrobbling are Shakira and Danzig.  Separately of course; they wouldn't go together at all, ho ho!  And surely no one else could be a fan of both these two?  And then YouTube did what it does best, and gave me this: