American Top 40 is a great way to keep up with the masses, but the hit parade is not exactly personalized. Last.fm, on the other hand, is like a nonstop long-distance dedication: The online music site spies on your listening habits, works some algorithmic magic, and plays back just-for-you songs. Creepy, perhaps, but effective.
The secret is Last.fm’s Audioscrobbler plug-in: It checks your existing music library and monitors your playlist (for iPods, the plug-in uploads a day’s worth of listening history to Last.fm when you dock your player). Knowing that just because you own a song doesn’t mean you love it, the software can tell whether you let it play all the way through or hit Fast Forward. Over time, Last.fm learns what you’re into and creates a music profile of you. It compares that with its database of other listener profiles to find potential matches. Besides playing songs it thinks you’ll like (the company has licenses for 500,000 of the 40 million songs in its database), it also recommends music for you to buy. Last.fm doesn’t use a formula based on musical attributes, which can result in recommendations that all sound the same. Rather, the London-based company figures that if two people like both Dolly Parton and Justin Timberlake, one of them may like that country-tinged Prince song the other has been grooving to. Spyware never sounded so good.
– Sonia Zjawinski
Music Reborn
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