Chris Garrett’s Personal Blog

I have a love-hate relationship with Last.fm. It’s weird.

In some ways it is great, discovering new music, seeing what people have listened to, all good. On the other hand even paid up members like me get these crippled 30 second tastes of music rather than full streamed tracks.

What’s that all about?

I understand that music companies might have their usual pig-headed approach to music rights etc, but the service (correct me if I am wrong) helps promote music to people who might not otherwise have heard it. A tiny snippet doesn’t do that very well.

Another gripe is it thinks I am a full-on prog-rock fan. Or into obscure Bolivian folk trios. Yes, my taste is pretty eclectic, and I do like a couple of prog bands but most of my musical taste (which they know very well) could not really be described that way. It’s like Amazons recommendation engine recommending bizarre choices because of gift purchases, one example seems to skew the whole bloody thing.

Glad I got that off my chest.

If you want to see what I am listening to my last.fm profile is here. Just, please, do not recommend 25min psychedelic Bolivian folk tracks.

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This entry was posted OLD on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 3:01 pm and is filed under archive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.