This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: Last.fm

Reaching a wider audience or just creating an echo chamber?

20 April 2008 19:52

Categories: Blogging, General, Internet, Personal, Technology

For the past few weeks I have been using Digsby, a smart Trillian-style multi-protocol IM client. I’ve tried such programs before — Trillian, Pidgin and Meebo — but for one reason or another they all annoyed me. For this reason, before Digsby I stuck to having MSN, Google Talk and Skype all open at once.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

13 comments

Muxtape: playlist nostalgia

11 April 2008 21:58

Categories: Entertainment, General, Internet, Music, Nostalgia, Personal, Technology

By now you may have heard of a website called Muxtape. In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t been shut down already. It’s probably the most blatantly illegal website since YouTube. Technically, I guess, you’re meant to own the copyright to everything you upload to the service. But of course that’s not what most people use it for.

Muxtape is an enticingly simple website that lets you make a little playlist of tunes, a bit like a mixtape. Webware jokes, as if you would remember mixtapes! Meanwhile, David Title ponders if you have to be between the ages of 29-45 for the mixtape to mean anything to you!

I’m 22 (almost typed 21 there… can’t bear the adulthood), and I love the romance of mixtapes. It is like instant nostalgia. Cassettes are meant to be naff, and they are to an extent. But holding a tape is quite special, like holding a past future in your hands. Defects such as tape hiss, wow and flutter are as acceptable as surface noise. They add to the quaint beauty of the cassette.

And here is the thing. I used to make mixtapes. Then one day I decided to “upgrade” to CD-Rs. The CD-Rs would surely be more reliable and durable, right? Pah. The CD-Rs I bought were defective. For some reason iTunes (or the CD-R, I don’t know which) was making the audio of each track start two seconds before the access points. I wasted 4 CD-Rs trying to fix it, to no avail. Then it was reported to me that the CD-R wouldn’t even play! Annoying or what? The packet of faulty CD-Rs still sits beside me unused.

For all of their faults, cassettes are at least more reliable in the medium term than this. I have come to the decision that CD mixes are a bit like sending someone a letter but typing it out rather than handwriting it. You still put in the hard graft constructing it, but it is still somehow less personal, less human.

Of course, Muxtape is nothing like a mixtape. Indeed, it is probably even worse than a CD. As has been pointed out by David Title, a real mixtape is:

hours of love and care and cursing your slipping on the pause button. It’s recording little personal messages between the songs. It’s handwritting the titles and artists in painfully small print. It’s an act of love.

Muxtapes cannot even be personal. The terms (whatever they’re worth, given the dubious legality of the service) restrict you to one account only — and that’s a public account.

Nonetheless, that cute picture of the C90, the blocks of colours, the oh-so-fashionable massive Helvetica font (not that I’m guilty of that one) and the sheer simplicity of Muxtape is enough to reel you in and get you to make your own.

And make my own I did. Here is my Muxtape.

I should point out that if you like any of the tunes on my Muxtape, I think you should buy the album (the ‘Buy from Amazon’ link on Muxtape is a new addition today — a handy hint). I bought all of these. In the case of John Cage, I bought four different performances of it. In the case of Autechre, I bought the album twice.

Incidentally, there is an interesting take on the legality or otherwise of Muxtape at WebJam. The fact that Muxtape does not provide you with an easy method to download the music may be its saving grace. Besides, the cat is out of the bag. In the same way as shutting down Napster didn’t stop peer to peer filesharing, closing down Muxtape will only lead to several new clones of it.

On the simplicity of Muxtape, it is appealing — but it does make it rather light of features. There is no search function and even Google is blocked from indexing pages on Maxtape. Instead, you are presented with a random list of Muxtapes. Apart from that, you have to rely on word-of-mouth to find anyone’s Muxtape.

It’s just as well some clever fellow has created a smart Last.fm / Muxtape mashup (via Qwghlm). Enter in your Last.fm username and it will find Muxtapes containing artists that you like. Awesome.

In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that Last.fm itself has provided its own playlist service for years now, and it is on much more solid legal ground. There are some annoying restrictions — of course, you can only choose from the tracks that Last.fm has on its servers. Plus, perhaps even more frustratingly, the music is shuffled. This robs you of one of the joys of putting together a mixtape: getting the track order right. Catch my Last.fm playlist here.

3 comments

Music became cheaper today

24 January 2008 01:18

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Internet, Music, Technology

There is some exciting news from Last.fm. I have been in love with that website ever since I signed up back in 2004, and there is now yet another reason to love it.

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Beforehand, you could only play a select few tracks in full for free — and to be honest, they were mostly rubbish. Now all four major labels as well as 150,000 indies are on board letting people listen to their music for free on Last.fm. Millions of songs are now at my fingertips.

Okay, so the music is not completely free. Once you’ve listened to a track three times, you will be blocked from listening to it again until you pay up. But complaining about this would be churlish. Even if you approach it as a kind of ‘try before you buy’ service, this is much, much better than anything that has come before.

For me, this is the day the recorded music industry has begun to face the music (excuse the pun). There have been signs of them facing up to the reality of a world with the internet. But even, for instance, their plans to sell DRM-free MP3s through Amazon was as much an attempt to derail Apple’s dominance in the digital download arena as anything else.

No doubt there will be questions about the financial viability of this. The BBC report on the announcement certainly adopts a slightly sniffy, sceptical tone.

It certainly feels strange, coming just a couple of weeks after Pandora closed its similar service in the UK on the basis that the labels were making it too difficult.

Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate…

But that is pretty much the model that Last.fm is adopting:

We’re not printing money to pay for this—but the business model is simple enough: we are paying artists and labels a share of advertising revenue from the website.

Today we’re redesigning the music economy.

How can Last.fm make it work if Pandora couldn’t? It is true that Last.fm has big backing in the form of its owner, CBS. But if it’s not financially viable, it’s not financially viable, right?

Maybe there is more to this, or there is something I’m missing. Leaving the Pandora issue aside, it looks as though something big has happened today — as though someone’s banged a gong and the majors have all woken up to what’s going on. And they’ve agreed to finally do something sensible about the situation. Today music became even cheaper, and we all became a bit richer.

5 comments

What I listened to in 2007

4 January 2008 02:09

Categories: Entertainment, General, Internet, Music, Personal, Technology

Music of 2007

A series of posts

I am a bit late with my ranking of albums of 2007. I know it’s the new year and it’s not very fashionable to be looking back once the new year has begun. But unlike some people — who publish their lists in early December or sometimes even mid-November — I like to wait until the end of the year until posting my end-of-year list.

Unfortunately, it is taking a bit of time for me to finish off the post. You know how I like to witter on. Plus, ahem, I still haven’t received a rather important album from 2007 through the post.

In the meantime, some stats porn from my Last.fm account to give you an idea of what I listened to in 2007.

A few caveats here. I got an iPod sometime during autumn, which means that I now scrobble my out-and-about listening habits, which wasn’t possible when I used my iRiver. As such, my obsession with Battles early on in the year only registers a little bit, whereas the purchase of Radiohead’s In Rainbows in October is visible for all to see.

Okay, on to the graph. I have written before about the rather fun LastGraph service. I have decided to create a LastGraph of my 2007 listening. Of course, it isn’t restricted to music that was released in 2007, but it does give a flavour of my listening habits over the year.

I’m afraid it isn’t easy to see the detail in this image, but as you can see it is rather large enough as it is. If you click on the image, you will be able to see the full-blown PDF file, if you are really all that interested. (Warning: The PDF is a big file — 2.64MB.)

The first 2007 releases to register in the graph are Field Music’s Tones of Town and Shining’s Grindstone. Battles’s Mirrored makes a small appearance in March, but as I said it is much lower than you would expect if you knew how much I genuinely listened to the album.

Besides Ceephax and Air, nothing too much of interest happens until June. Then comes Björk’s Volta. Not soon afterwards comes the magical week which saw the release of albums by Justice and Simian Mobile Disco. Also registering here are album I bought by Cornelius and Stereolab, although these weren’t from 2007. (Incidentally, this period shows a sustained reduction in the amount of music I listened to, reflecting how unusually busy I was during the summer.)

In August you can see the biggest patch of the year — The Future Sound of London, from when I bought From the Archives volumes 1–3. After that comes another huge patch of Blur, a period where I bought a few albums of theirs and even wrote about them on this blog. A bit of an obsessive period.

Soon enough pretty much everything is crowded out by In Rainbows. If you look carefully towards the end of the year you can also see The Fiery Furnaces, Gescom and Burial.

In terms of charts, here is how my rolling year chart for artists looks like.

Radiohead — 811 plays
The Future Sound of London — 613
Autechre — 602
Pulp — 567
The Fiery Furnaces — 549
Boards of Canada — 538
Blur — 530
Aphex Twin — 453
Squarepusher — 428
Battles — 425

And for tracks, In Rainbows pretty much dominates. Not bad considering it’s only been out since October. Battles and Shining also get a look in here. Justice, Björk and The Fiery Furnaces also feature in the top 50.

I’ll post my thoughts on the music of 2007 over the next week or so.

« — Next in series »

3 comments

A pot of gold for us all In Rainbows

15 October 2007 09:09

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Internet, Music, Technology

(Sorry for using that pun, which has now been used by precisely 118,837 people.)

Still biding my time before I write my review of Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. In the meantime, a bit of number crunching.

One of the interesting things about this has been the hype in certain quarters about how high Radiohead will be in the Last.fm charts. Nobody seems to care about the official charts any more, but the Last.fm charts are another matter!

Here are the results:

The track hype list was annexed by Radiohead last week. This was predictable enough.

Radiohead were the world’s most popular band last week. Perhaps this isn’t a surprise. What is really shocking is the scale of their popularity. Radiohead had 118,836 unique listeners registered on Last.fm compared to 73,373 listeners for The Beatles.

By way of comparison, this time last month Radiohead were third with 59,618 listeners and 541,263 plays.

In terms of tracks played, Radiohead made The Beatles look like a footnote. Radiohead songs were played 3,308,175 times last week. Songs by The Beatles reached a meagre 844,600 — just a quarter of what Radiohead had.

The top ten tracks of the week are all from In Rainbows. As you would expect, they are neatly in order of their position on the album.

The leap from number 10 to number 11 is huge. Number 10, ‘Videotape’ by Radiohead had 211,332 plays. Number 11, ‘Stronger’ by Kanye West, had only 49,293.

Interestingly, older Radiohead songs occupy four other spots in the top 20. In fact, old Radiohead songs were boosted all round (with tracks from Kid A typically climbing between 150 and 300 places each on the previous week).

This time last month, only one Radiohead song appeared in the top 20.

Perhaps one shouldn’t read too much into it. The sample size is huge, but of course it is also self-selected. Nevertheless, I doubt any other reliable music popularity data has ever shown one band to be so dominant.

Although the hype surrounding it was mega, the immense popularity of In Rainbows is clearly unprecedented. This is all the more astonishing given the fact that nobody even knew the album existed until this month. And a record label didn’t have a say in any of it.

The internet has dramatically decreased the costs of distributing music. The record companies might hate the fact that they are now out of a job. But it has undoubtedly made us all richer.

Update: Just thought of another way to look at the numbers. As I said, the first track had the most listeners, and the final track had the fewest. But which tracks lost the most listeners?

‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ was the least popular song, losing 2,381 listeners. This is a surprise to me at least. The track that follows is actually the most popular. ‘All I Need’ lost only 53 listeners out of the 61,800 who sat through ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’!

The next least popular song was ‘Bodysnatchers’, which lost 2,020 listeners right at the start of the album. Perhaps this is to be expected in a way. It is very early on in the album, so people with a low amount of patience will give up early on. Having heard ’15 Step’ and the start of ‘Bodysnatchers’, many people probably decided not to bother with the rest of the album.

The next-biggest stinker is ‘House of Cards’.

83% of listeners lasted all the way through to the end.

Track title	Listeners lost
15 Steps	n/a
Bodysnatchers	2,020
Nude	921
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi	2,381
All I Need	53
Faust Arp	1,136
Reckoner	1,135
House of Cards	1,792
Jigsaw Falling Into Place	847
Videotape	812

Looking at the ratio of the number of plays to the number of unique listeners is possibly a good way of telling which tracks will have the most staying power. They are the ones that have merited the most repeat listens so far. Looking just at the number of plays might not capture this, because people who didn’t listen to the later tracks don’t know whether they are worth listening to again or not.

‘All I Need’ once again comes up top, with a ratio of 4.02. I would certainly agree that it is probably the best song on the album. Next comes ‘Reckoner’. Once again, the least popular song is ‘House of Cards’.

Track title	Plays / Listeners
15 Steps	3.92
Bodysnatchers	3.80
Nude	3.94
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi	3.83
All I Need	4.02
Faust Arp	3.80
Reckoner	4.01
House of Cards	3.69
Jigsaw Falling Into Place	3.81
Videotape	3.77

Comments closed

doctorvee