Scrobbling

Last.fm is a music service owned by CBS that acts as a one stop shop for all things music. You can find band bios, listen to clips, use the radio function, and purchase (or listen to for free) songs from an enormous catalog of songs by most of the "Big 4" recording companies. But since the site only allows you to listen to a full song 3 times before limiting future plays to 30 second clips, the site has little use for me, except for one small thing. Instead, the function of last.fm I find most fascinating is called Audioscrobbler, which is a tool you can download from the site to be used with most audio programs (iTunes, Windows media, winamp), which essentially collects data about the music you listen to and converts it into graphical form. They call it "audioscrobbling," or just plain "scrobbling." Whether you listen to the song from the confines of the last.fm site itself or just listen to your own library on iTunes,etc, Audioscrobbler sees that you've listened and sends the information to the last.fm database. The same is true if you listen mostly on an iPod or other mp3 player. All you do is plug in the iPod, and audioscrobbler automatically (if you want) scrobbles every song you've listened to since the last time you were online. It can be interesting, for sure. Here's my all-time chart (I've only been a member for a little less than a year.

Of course the system has its flaws. Certainly it can't scrobble everything you listen to, specifically if you listen to CDs (who listens to Cds??), but it paints a fairly accurate picture of use. Another problem is that on last.fm people seem to derive pleasure from having listened to a band more times than someone else. So I'd say if using audioscrobbler is going to dictate what you listen to for bragging purposes, it becomes both a complete waste of an otherwise interesting program, and an inaccurate picture of your true listening habits over time.