I’ve been a member of Last.fm for at least a couple of months now. Originally, I registered under the guise of Twangville with the hopes that our other contributors would collectively use a single account and we’d have an excellent account of what we’ve been listening to. It turns out there were a couple of problems with my plan.
For one, if anyone is listening to the Last.fm player and then using the same account logs in from a different machine Last.fm is smart enough to only play on one computer at a time. Furthermore, I didn’t take into full account how Mayer, Mike and Sarah listen to music. Mayer and Mike have the world’s greatest record collections both in size and quality. I’m not kidding. Together they could keep a playlist playing for an entire year without hearing the same song play more than once. Mayer was an early adopter of Sony’s mini disc technology and chooses to digitize his music for portable use this way. I’ve seen Mike with a mini disc player as well but I think of late he’s digitized nearly every album he owns to a PC and has built an amazing database from which he streams all of his music on through the Windows Media Player. Sarah, on the other hand, is more like myself and uses Apple’s iTunes / iPod to listen to music as well as compact discs. I believe she tested the Scrobbler (Last.fm’s method of recording songs you listen to) but I’m guessing wasn’t a big fan. I also like to use it to capture songs I listen to on Yahoo! LaunchCast but admit the process of doing so is a bit too tedious. You have to turn on the Scrobbler every time after you’ve turned on LaunchCast which only works on Windows IE.
Long story short, as much as I think Scrobbling could be better, the idea still interests me. I want to try an experiment by creating a new group on Last.fm and inviting anyone who’s a fan of various sorts of twang (alt-country, americana, rock, indie, folk, blues, etc.) to join in. I realize there response will be minimal to start but maybe it will grow over time. I’d love to see the “wisdom of crowds” in action and learn from what you listen to.
So, please come join the new Last.fm group, “In the Name of Twang” and get Scrobbling. There has to be at least 3 members to keep the group from being booted and at least 15 to produce weekly charts. I hope there are at least 2 of you out there. Kent, are you game?
By the way, what is a Scrobble anyway?
About the author: Gainesville, FL area creative by day. Music is my muse. I host Twangville’s weekly Readers‘ Pick.