08 November 2007

Why I'm not posting my last.fm digs - the case against Skrobbling

If you subscribe to my fan club newsletter (and pay the exorbitant dues required to do so) you have probably been asking yourself something along the lines of "Owen, why don't you post your last.fm top five like all the other cool TMAs? Do you think you're too good or something?"

The answer is a bifurcated one. On the one hand I have serious problems with my song data not getting through to the grand old skrobblin' machine. I more often than not have a little red tied eighth notes where a black one should be... or stranger yet, a little # sign. What do these things mean? Last.FM is silent! It only occasionally seems to upload my listening habits and when it does it is rarely representative of my actual taste in music.

Which leads me to my second problem: my charts are consistently either unrepresentative of the music I like or overly representative of music I don't like OR don't want people to know I like.

Three artists in my list of 50 top artists overall and FIVE of my top ten artists in the last week are either bands I was/am in or various silly garageband/protools projects I made and listen to out of vanity. I'm clearly biased in this regard. These should not be in my top artists list! On top of that, it can't be true that I listened to myself half the time in the past week. Skrobbler, you're incorrect.

The non-me artists in my toplists are even weirder. "Spor" takes the number 7 slot in the past week. I don't know who the hell Spor is! my friend Jake sent me an mp3 and I've listened to the song maybe once. Jesu is on there- I have one song by Jesu that I'm not sure I've ever listened to all the way through.

I don't know if it's a problem with firewalls or modems or whatever, but Last.FM has to get its act together if it's gonna continue to profess to "represent" my music taste in any accurate way.

So no, I'm not posting my digs.

Shut up.

1 comment:

becktronbexbecky said...

It's unfortunate that you're so vain.