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Underground > Radio & Music >

Audioscrobbler, Barbelith and collaborative charts

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12:14 / 17.04.04

Ok - this is basically a bit of a plug for a service called Audioscrobbler which I joined up with about a year ago but have only just got into using. Here's how it works. You sign up with an account at this site, then download the plugin for the MP3 program that you use on your computer. For me it's iScrobbler because I use iTunes on Mac OSX. You then input your username and password into the plugin. That's it, bascally. You're then set-up.

What it does is everytime you play a song, it tells the central site. That's basically it. But from this they create individual pages like this one for me: Orlando that list the artists that you like most and your favourite songs as well as putting up what you're listening to at the moment. You can then link to that page as and when you want. More importantly, it tracks how many people are listening to songs generally, assembles web-wide charts about what people are listening to and the fast-moving new entries etc, and lets you see the preferences of other people who have similar interests to you. And you can also create groups (like this one for Barbelith that show the collective tastes of all the members in it.

So basically it's a great big recommendations and music-discovery system that lets you find new music by seeing your friend's favourite music collections, and introducing you to people who like the same kinds of music that you do. Moreover, you can start conversations around any of the artists. And all the data is freely available under a Creative Commons license for other people to play with. Generally it's pretty awesome and you should all join...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:21 / 17.04.04

That sounds pretty damn cool, actually- I may have to check it out.

No star here laces

15:12 / 17.04.04

I've joined and applied to join barbelith. I'm tyr1...

05:10 / 18.04.04

I've joined as well. Same username as this lovely establishment.

No star here laces

05:42 / 18.04.04

This is good, actually, because unlike file sharing software it works off what you listen to lots, rather than just what you have in your collection.

I've already discovered two great tracks through this thing (esquire1983 is my musical twin...)

21:53 / 20.04.04

I've always wondered at the actual utility of data like this. I love data, but I'm not sure what, other than interesting trends in similar music tastes that might be found, could be gleaned from checking it out, or even gathering it in the first place - but it IS interesting to see, in a strange way, how the high-ends of participating mp3-listeners' music choices level out to a common denominator.

Check this out, statistics from the week prior to April 18:

The top 10 songs played by Audioscrobbler listeners:
1. Coldplay - Clocks
2. Modest Mouse - Float On
3. Evanescence - My Immortal
4. Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out
5. The Postal Service - Such Great Heights
6. Coldplay - The Scientist
7. The Darkness - I Believe In A Thing Called Love
8. Radiohead - Karma Police
9. Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
10. The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Top 10 Artists for last week (and this surprised me):

1. Radiohead
2. Nirvana
3. Metallica
4. Coldplay
5. Red Hot Chili Peppers
6. Linkin Park
7. Pink Floyd
8. Incubus
9. Weezer
10. The Beatles

The data's taken from fairly limited numbers (none of the tracks are beyond a few hundred and the biggest artist number was 1108), but I wonder how accurate a slice of internet music-listening culture the audioscrobbler community represents in relation to the music-listening/buying world at large. It seems really banal to me (Metallica? Incubus? The Chili Peppers? People are still listening to Weezer?), though I confess I often fall victim to thinking internet hipsters are hipper than everyone thinks...

The potential for misuse of mp3-listening data in relation to the RIAA or other associated bodies is a bit disconcerting, but since it's mostly anonymous, I suppose I shouldn't fret.

Is this data useful or interesting to anyone besides marketeers and information junkies?

No star here laces

08:33 / 21.04.04

What I find great is say you've just discovered a song you really love. You click on it, and find out who else is listening to it. If somebody else has listened to it like 20 times, then there's a good chance you'll also like the other stuff they've listened to lots. So it's useful in that sense - using other people's similarities to yourself to find more music that you like. I'm much more interested in that personal-level detail than the overall charts.

Although it'll be interesting to see the Barbelith charts when they come up...

15:20 / 21.04.04

yeah, im liking this, although its still gonna be awhile before it starts to get really good, as i think ya need at least 250 songs in yr profile before its can get a good idea of what yr into etc etc.
only problem is, when my sister uses i-tunes it logs what she's playing, so i have a couple dodgy tunes which i cant get rid of.
im on the same moniker as here.....

18:36 / 21.04.04

has anyone used the iTunes for windows client? is it going to gorch up my computer? I wouldn't like my computer gorched.

18:45 / 21.04.04

iTunes for windows is pretty stable and decent and cool, but you have to bear in mind that it might do some things you're not expecting. I think by default it reorganises all your MP3s into nicely structured directories of artists with albums inside them. I find this profoundly useful and cool because I always know where everything is, but a lot of people don't like it at all and find it invasive and creepy.

18:48 / 21.04.04

The uses thing is also really interesting. I work at the BBC in Radio and Music Interactive and - obviously - one of the things we look at is interesting projects that use information about music and listening patterns and stuff like that. We're looking for interesting music-related projects that we can help or work with or build things on top of. Audioscrobbler has some interesting datasets that you could use to create a Radio1 listeners group or site online that has the actual stats of what some of Radio 1's listeners are actually listening to on a daily basis. That could be an interesting supplement to the chart shows for a start. There have to be more uses like that, or things that are around that kind of area that I just haven't thought of yet.

19:01 / 21.04.04

One thing that occured to me is that this kind of site could help figure out the life-span of a song. Certain singles are sure to be played often while they're current but then sink like a stone, while other songs remain in the top 40 or so by dint of being classics.

You could first track how quickly a song spreads amongst the users and then see how long it takes for it to vanish again. There's also potential for correlating the time spent in a user's top ten to the type of music the person usually listens to, as well as the age and gender. You'd get the mother of all SPSS files from this, but it'd provide someone with years of data analysis...not me, thank d.o.y.c.

One thing that annoys me is that it seems to use the ID3 tag in Winamp, and ignores the 'various artists' entry that gets slotted in by a lot of ripper programs that use cddb/gracenote...I'm not nearly as religious as some in keeping my ID3 tags tidy and accurate, which can screw up the results a bit.

23:44 / 21.04.04

The ID3 wonkiness is a bit annoying, but the quality of ouput relies on the quality of input. Some of my Del Tha Funkee Homo Sapien files list as Funkee Homosapher in the local CDDB I use, so they list that way (and it's not just for me, either - this Homosapher fellow's picking up steam).

Another thing this data could likely illustrate is the ebb/flow/resurgence of old songs, ie. the huge upswing of people listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit this month due to the anniversary of Cobain's death. I'm sure there are less obvious/more interesting cases than that, though, where the themes/zeitgeist of particular eras and songs become newly relevant or exciting to the listener-base for Reason X. That kind of thing really interests me (why are Weezer fans seeing resurgence since the beginning of March?)

I'd love it if there were charts/graphs...

(Actually, looking at the old data, Nirvana and Weezer have consistently been in the Top 10-15 most listened to bands. Same with Radiohead, Metallica, Coldplay, and a few others. And Smells Like Teen SPirits been consistently listened to since they started keeping track of data like this in Dec. 2003.)

Math is for suckers!

03:39 / 22.04.04

I just signed up and joined the Barbelith group under the rather fanboyish name of Kingmob235. I think this thing is great. Its got no real purpose, but it is a lot of fun to see what other people are listening to. If your one of those folks who judges people by what they listen to, then you could very possibly meet a lot of interesting people. I think that once they have everything up and running, like the reccomendation systems and such, it will be a lot more useful to more people.

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:34 / 22.04.04

Cat Power and Ted Leo, Mr Laces? You surprise me... Although not in a bad way.

13:43 / 22.04.04

Tom, I actually have iTunes for windows and love it very much. Certainly the best music program I've used, though the *shuffle* still seems to leave a bit to be desired. Will there be a shuffle function invented to satisfy me? iTunes DEFINITELY seems to play favorites.

I was talking about the audioscrobbler plug-in for iTunes. I just want to know if it's easy to get off my computer if it causes problems.

14:59 / 22.04.04

...just realised that this thing is also a great way of telling when a song's stuck in someone's head, 'cause then it rockets to the top slot in the list. Not that I'm embarrassed to have Journey as my #1...ok, yes I'm embarrassed.

nedrichards is confused

15:45 / 22.04.04

How long until we see people h4xx0ring the ID3 tags to send each other messages with what they're 'listening' to?

17:21 / 23.04.04

I signed up and I've just applied to join the Barbelith group using my slave name, sambeckwith.

By the way, don't let all the Matthew Sweet tracks I've been listening to recently worry you - I just ripped a greatest hits album and it's currently taking up a disproportionate chunk of my rather small playlist.

22:55 / 23.04.04

I, too, listened to Matthew Sweet recently. But the record has been wiped, so my dignity is preserved. Though Girlfriend is a pretty bitchin' teen-years tune.

Everyone IS listening to Weezer on this thing - it's even got me digging up old B-Sides. Isn't there a Weezer anniversary coming up that I can use to rationalize this shameless emo revival? Nice to see some people listening to 'That Dog' (Tom among them...)

All this data's got me wondering about how my personal interest in music differs from that of other human beings. I tend to cluster songs by particular artists in twos and threes, even if I shuffle afterward; which reminded me that I prefer to check out the work of artists I'm interested in rather than just 'listening to music' and seeing what fits - my interest is more narrative, almost. There are exceptions... Hm. More later.

23:36 / 23.04.04

Just gonna say, I tried AudioScrobbler and the client kept failing on me (I'm on Mac OS X). A newer site called listen-to.com seems to cause no problems for anybody I've recommended it to, plus it has a lot more options for charts, groups, and even broadcasting which song you're listening to on a web page or IM profile. I've been much more pleased with it than AudioScrobbler.

18:15 / 27.04.04

But Audioscrobbler has a cooler name and logo...

20:59 / 28.04.04

I usually just make a really big playlist with ALL of my music on it, put it on shuffle, and keep skipping until I get a song I want to hear. Wouldn't this record even the songs I skipped?

00:59 / 29.04.04

I don't think the song is submitted until it's played halfway through.

10:30 / 29.04.04

Of course that's if it works anyway. I'm having problems getting it to work, my log file seems okay but the songs never show up on the webpage. I worked hard all day yesterday and what do I have to show for it? huh?

10:32 / 29.04.04

Worked all day playing music I mean.

10:37 / 29.04.04

And it looks like listen-to.com is shutting down "indefinitely" in June, and is no longer accepting new users. So plah.

12:10 / 29.04.04

If your songs don't show up, they're held in a queue on the audioscrobbler's server due to technical issues. Once repairs/adjustments are carried out, the songs are processed and your account is updated. Seeing as their user numbers have skyrocketed in the last three weeks, there's been a lot of downtime...

Red Cross Iodized Salt

02:32 / 30.04.04

I signed up for this and ran the plugin for iTunes. It worked okay when I tried it out first, but hasn't updated my playlist since. The weird thing is, it keeps trying to access my entire keychain (the OS X utility that stores passwords) rather than just the 'iScrobbler' item in the keychain.

I think I'll hold off using it until the remaining bugs have been worked out.

09:00 / 03.05.04

Am on, now, and have applied to join the group. Username tajmahal. No idea what it'll throw up given the music I listen to on the laptop often differs to what I'll listen to on the stereo...

Phex: Dorset Doom

21:33 / 03.05.04

This looks like as good a way as any to force my tastes on others... look for phex (in 'artistic' lowercase, like bell hooks or something) in the applications pending.

22:02 / 02.08.04

So now that Audioscrobbler's had their day in Wired, what kind of predictions do you forsee? Do you think XM radio will acquire the logic and apply it to their programming charts? Will Clear Channel take notice? How will Top 40 ever survive?

03:38 / 03.08.04

You know what this thing needs?
An off button.

That way, if I'm listening to some new song or album (or something really embaressing that I don't want my friends to know about), I can turn it off, that way people don't think I'm obsessed. I might even hate the album and never listen to it again, but the way the plugin is now, it would still make it seem as if that album was all I listened too.

Also, does this thing note when you play videos? Cause if the world knows about my musical preferences, that's cool... but if the world knows about my pornography preferences, well, not so cool.

12:10 / 03.08.04

Well, you can always go through the preferences and turn the thing off. And no, it doesn't recognise videos.

Will the Top 40 survive? Probably. What is interesting is that the charts compiled on the website rarely reflect the charts in the real world. After all, if something has shot to #1 in the singles chart, you'd think it would do the same online, no? There's a distinct lack of RnB, rap and hiphop in there.

14:08 / 03.08.04

Has the top 40 singles chart ever truly been reprisentative?

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