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You should look into putting your music up on Last.fm, if you haven't already.

Would this affect something like Last.fm, where users have uploaded all the music that's streamed by their radio station?

Tagging MP3s: Musicbrainz has projects to automatically tag MP3s with metadata on track name, album, etc. As for tagging them with mood: good luck; however All Music Guide has been working on this sort of thing for years; see also Last.fm. Integrating these into a desktop would be nice, though your comparison to "Microsoft tunnel vision" is quite harsh seeing as open source desktops have long had features that Windows sorely lacks, such as transparent SSH file transfers, thumbnailing of PDFs and other non-photo documents, and viewers for multiple file types, embedded right into the file manager.

But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatarr said to them: 'Behold your Music!'

I was skeptical, but I seem to like most of his stuff.

http://www.last.fm/ anyone?

Take the money you would've spent on satellite radio in the next 6 months (as well as the receiver) and purchase random recommended songs off iTunes (subscribe to last.fm for a good recommendation list based on your own tastes) or some other service instead, then bring them with you on random shuffle play.

I listen to CDs or other personal audio half the time (unless one of the shows I like on CBC radio happens to be on the radio, or the news). Paying for music I might not want to listen to strikes me as odd, personally.

Alas, the Pirates of the North Saskatchewan are a dying breed

Well, if that's the case, then something like Last.fm would be a good place to test it - ideally, people should find most of their musical neighbors have very similar views and the like.

I can say that for the most part, I've gotten along well with all my neighbors on the site that I've chatted with.

Hopefully she will become more popular here. Then again, sites like that on the web are were I find new artists, though it is a much more active process than listening to random folks on the radio.

People Eating Tasty Animals?

I have long considered mother nature a precious and intimate friend. As stewards and stewardesses of this beautiful planet and all creatures that rely upon it for survival, we are entitled to the savory and delicious meals we call animals. In my opinion, the ethical treatment of an animal means killing it before you eat it. And I am all for the ethical treatment of animals. In that way, I am all for the eating of tasty animals.

I've played with XFN and FOAF on my site, but have seen very little take-up in the last couple of years. There are some social network sites that incorporate them, but I think you can only link to others in a given site.

There's also clainID to show what pages relate to you, or not as the case may be. In some cases you will be able to prove ownership by setting a tag in the page header. del.icio.us and last.fm support this feature.

Of course, in some cases, you don't want a site to be traced back to you.

The iPod clickwheel's importance will vary from person to person. I have a 4G iPod, and a Zune - and I find that using the Zune, I don't miss the clickwheel at all. I fully expected to, and I don't.

In fact, between the two devices, I can't think of one thing that I like more about the iPod than the Zune. Perhaps it would be partially due to the fact that I only have a 4G iPod instead of the latest ones, but I like the Zune more than I expected to. The only things that really disappoint me are that I can't use at as a portable hard drive (easily - I know about the registry changes to kind of enable it), and that I can't upload my played music to Last.fm.

(To be upfront here, I work at MS - as part of the Xbox team, so I even got a free Zune - in pink. But I also use WinAmp instead of WMP, and Firefox instead of IE. I use whatever fits my needs best - and right now, my Zune gets used most of the time, and my iPod is always connected to my iPod-compatible alarm clock.)

Mozart has been busy decomposing.

hehe, cool! there's a new track called "Addict" on our myspace (I know, I know, as a techie it's horrible, but it does work for reaching 'normal' people). It's the first thing we've finished from our next cd which should be finished by about, um, March (hopefully!).

I also uploaded the "Timestorm" album to last.fm. You can stream it all and download two of the tunes free (only 128kbps, which I find pretty unlistenable, but hey, it is only a taster). We've sold out of the CD now, but we'll still sell DRM free, LAME-encoded 320s to anybody who wants it. Unfortunately I can't seem to get CubeCart to talk to Paypal, so the actual shop with automatic secure download link presented upon receipt, isn't there yet. You have to trust us to email you the download link :(

I tried to do something similar in concept the other day, clicking around last.fm in search of someone with whom I did not share a single common artist.

The closest I got was one MrLag, with whom the only commonality was U2 and Dido :-)

(Of course, my "musical opposite" should have listened to about the same number of artists/tracks for this to be interesting)

Working with metadata from a non-trusted community is a few orders of difficulty harder than working with trusted metadata. All the examples from non-trusted user groups that I've seen are either 1) only able to track fairly simple data or 2) ambitious but disappointing. I'd put Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation in the first category. Relevance, quality, and a few kinds of description are possible, but these are fairly simple things to track. Most internet resources would require metadata that is much harder to validate to be useful.

A primary example of this that comes to my mind is the current crop of music recommendation services. The idea behind these sites is that they can, through one of various methods, recommend music to you based on what you like. I've experimented somewhat extensively with Pandora and Last.fm, and the difference in the quality of their suggestions is amazing.

Last.fm uses community data for recommendations. It tracks tags that users attach to songs and the collection of artists that each user listens to. Based on what artists you have listened to or which tags you select, it attempts to point out other artists you might like.

Pandora makes recommendations based on musical qualities. The data the service uses comes from the Music Genome Project, which paid people who have studied music to catalogue the musical qualities of songs in their database. Employees listen to songs and select which attributes are applicable to the song from a list of hundreds of attributes. To use the service, you enter some songs and artists that you like, and based on the musical attributes of those songs and artists, it recommends other songs you might like.

The results that the services provide, at least in my case, are like night and day. Last.fm's recommendations are heavily influenced by what's popular and how a common user would categorize an artist or song. They sort-of hit the right areas, but it doesn't get much better than Amazon's recommendations. Pandora's recommendations always seem to be more on target, even though it uses only a few artists or songs that you enter at the start, in contract to Last.fm, which can use my entire play history.

I guess a lot of this can be chalked up to the difference between association and relation - without some type of new innovation, it seems that community-based metadata can only be based on association, which is a far cry short of relation. Yes, it is a type of relation, but a set of data has qualities that a few simple tags from users are not going to be able to touch. It seems to me the next generation of metadata will only be possible when we can figure out a way to get the sort of data that Pandora uses from a community group. It's a daunting challenge that tagging and simple user activities like the Google Image Labeller have just started to slightly touch.

We have to own up to the fact that selling hard-copies of a reproducible digital media is out of date. I remember reading on a /. comment that it's a matter of competition, and that the "pirated" media is more worthwhile than the original, legal CD. **AA will eventually have to accept the fact that times have changed, and that they will have to change likewise in order to maintain their grip on the media.

One of the most heartening phenomena I've seen is the ability for an entirely independent artist to actually make it in this new landscape of virtual publication. If only 1% of artists previously got a record deal with a major label, now nearly 100% can have some degree of exposure on a worldwide network. Finding an audience is not nearly as challenging as it was a few years ago; bandwidth is cheap, and communities are coming together to offer social music networking (think http://last.fm/), which are amazingly bringing music that would never hear [sic] the light of day into the mainstream consciousness.

Furthermore, it's easier to support your favorite artist now. Your money actually goes (in most cases) to the artist himself, instead of to a massive corporation (compare to CD sales which barely reaches your artist's pocket). I don't see it as a "rights-management" issue anymore; I simply see people who are willing to support an artist who creates music they like. It's kind of a reversal of roles, and it's very, very positive.

Diversification of music, stronger ties between musician and listener, better usage of money paid to artists .... we're undergoing a natural process of eliminating the middleman in a changing "transaction" ... and what we call Piracy is sort of a bastard name for a mandatory stage.

I have an independent label. We have interns manage getting the releases out to all of the major sites.
We track royalties and sales data from all of them.
in addition to iTunes store, the catalog is available on most pay sites:
http://www.playittonight.com/
http://www.dancerecords.com/artists/Synthique
http://www.last.fm/
http://www.emusic.com/artist/11616/11616213.html
http://www.napster.com/view/artist/index.html?id=1 1638090

I just noticed that I have stuff on the WalMart music site. That's disturbing, since I don't remember anyone contacting them..
http://musicdownloads.walmart.com/catalog/servlet/ ArtistServlet?id=36183 //teh evil

I don't think the radio is good for finding music anymore. It's just the internet is so much easier and better for that.

One exception is CBC radio 3, which does a program on CBC radio 2 (yea, they really make is simple for us) on saturday nights from like, 7:30pm-12am or something (it's live, so where I'm from it starts at 4:30pm). I just record the stream using this guy (probably linux only) and listen to it at work during the week.

CBC3 also has a chart here with links to a site where you can listen to full sample tracks streaming. Then you can grab torrents from the usual places to see if you really want to get an album, or take your chances and order it from amazon.ca or cdplus.com (which is canadian)

Also last.fm is awesome for finding new music. Just find someone who listens to music you like, and grab torrents of other stuff they're listening to.

My profile is here.

So you think that these "partnerships" are somehow indicative of the grand ushering in of a brave new world? That putting music videos and TV shows up online will somehow make it all different? This is still all about money. Don't think that just because these corporations do this means that they have "seen the light" and are changing/have changed their ways. Everyone will still get compensated. Well, except for the average artist; those musicians will still get screwed and fade into obscurity, because they didn't get quite popular enough or sell enough albums.

Know where the real change is at? The slow takeover of these conventional media producers by smaller, more agile labels and media producers. With digital distribution costs tending toward zero with time, the Internet being pretty much accessible to anyone, and production costs dropping fast for anyone with an average computer, the large corporations may not be needed anymore. Even the manufacture of physical media is becoming easier and cheaper. It's happening in the indie community already. Granted, the signal:noise ratio might be worse, but social networking services like last.fm (and countless others) will act like a filter. They will connect people with music and media that they will like based on their tastes, and could bring a truly talented musician's release to the top fairly fast without the need for a music label's "promotion". It's like word of mouth on crack. We see this slowly starting to happen with music, and it will happen with television, and movies as well.

Don't get me wrong, I think (hope) that we will enter a world where everyone will get the media they want, for a fair price, the artists will be compensated fairly, and happy. Everyone wins, and we still could have popular superstars. The problem is that it sounds far too idyllic for the current market. The big companies are really entrenched in their ways and resistant to change. A new generation of executive management that grew up with online music may be needed in these companies before any real adapting takes place. The number of indie labels may explode in that time. The majority of dinosaurs didn't adapt; they died because they couldn't adapt fast enough, and were replaced by the smaller, though more adaptable mammal. I think the same will happen here.

To bring the thread back onto the oddly off-topic subject, one of the traits of the medical definition of euphoria is that the feeling of happiness is not necessarily well-founded. I don't think that "a big change" is imminent, I think that evidence does not point to it happening, so I believe the view is not well-founded. And the GGP poster had a rather giddy, euphoric tone. You are right about one thing, though...I'm still me.

What is wrong with an iPod that plays nothing but Steely Dan?

That's what I was thinking :-)

Last.fm - top artists:
Steely Dan - 13654
They Might be Giants - 4493
Donald Fagen - 3532

About the "sticky issue". I'd like to add another datapoint, the Global Track Chart of Last.fm. Acording to Alexa they reach 1 on every 500 people, so Last.fm's data is pretty good. From these charts, only "Justin Timberlake - SexyBack" from the top-10 "pirated tracks" is in this week's top-200 of Last.fm.

So, maybe.. what the current top tracks are, isn't that important. How they compare to the long tail (everything else), might. If the current top-10/50/200 really points to big chunk of exploitable market, then of course the music studios should go for it. But quite possibly there's much more to be had from a longer vision than just "what's cool now".

A Last.fm like site that would mail me hardcopy's to keep of stuff I like and might like, on a subscription basis. I think that could work really well. Last.fm already links to Amazon.com, they might as well take the next step.

Last.fm is another one of the demographics music websites. Very nice, i've used it for a year and a half now. It's turned me on to music in other lands that I quite enjoy.

I am guessing he cribbed the idea from the likes of http://last.fm/ , a music site which has a similar system. (Editorialization: Except better)

Right, that's what I thought you were implying. Anyway, you are a lot more certain of that than I am.

It's a horrible sample, blah, blah, blah, but check it out anyway:

http://www.last.fm/music/%22Weird+Al%22+Yankovic/+ fans

Damn right.

I'm at http://www.last.fm/user/notaste/ and I have no problem admitting what I like.

Enya is a wonderful artist. I thank my great Aunt for introducing me to her music. I listen to many other things as well, and I don't give a crap:

http://last.fm/user/ahsile_ii/

I made a comment this morning about not liking the dixie chicks, but it's all a farce. Ever since I heard their rendition of landslide, I've been hooked.

Mine

i don't write for the WSJ, but i've always felt that if you like crap, there's no shame in it. why try to conform if you have to compromise what you actually feel? why lie to yourself? on last.fm, young man, there's a place you can go.

Creative Commons

Defective by Design's List of DRM-Free Music Sites

dmusic

Electronic Frontier Foundation List of "Artists Online"

emusic.com

Fading Ways Records

FreeCulture.org

harveydanger.com

Janis Ian.com

last.fm

Lime Light Radio

live365.com free downloads

MagnaTune

myspace.com

Nettwerk Download Store

R.evolution I.n P.rogress

RIAARadar.com

uncoolcentral.com

Vision Metal Records

I keep a list on my blog and welcome more suggestions.

But hang on, goats don't shave!

Any recommendations for that? I've taken to rebooting to an OS X install CD and running Disk Utility every week, but it'd be better if I could use Dan the Automator to do the backup every night.

Perhaps it would be an advanced form of Internet radio, where each user gets a personalized stream of the music they like, and Google uses their context and marketing technology to make a tidy profit off of the millions of attentive ears. And of course, the music content they included would have to be free...

Where time becomes a loop

YouTube has a simple form of colaborative filtering, in the form of ratings, view counts, and favourite counts. It'd be nice to see a video site that used a more sophisticated form, getting recommendations from users having a similar taste, such as the Last.fm music site.

There are "who listens to what" charts here:
http://www.last.fm/charts/music/track/

Obviously, any music community that you have to join is to a certain extent self-selecting, but no more so than iTunes. It's not a million miles from the current UK chart, either (last.fm is UK / European based and so that's probably the best comparison).

However, this makes the assumption that all someone is doing is voice. If you looked at my ssh tunnels over tcp/443, it has everything I'm doing going through it (essentially like a VPN), and it is all to the same remote box that proxies what I do.

I don't think NARUS can tell when voice calls start and stop if I'm running remote Terminal Services (RDP and/or Citrix), other VPNs to other customers (within the SSH), web traffic, email, steaming music (last.fm. While I'm very unique, and what I do is unique, I don't think TS and/or steaming music is unique. My workflow involves constant open VPNs with SSH and/or telnet and/or RDP. With it all run over a single SSH over TCP/443, there is no way to break down what is going on by traffic signatures, unless I do nothing but the voice call. However, I always have debugs and remote desktop running in the background coming in.

I think a NARUS box only works if it can see where the traffic is really going to. Since I proxy/tunnel all my traffic to a host I have on a DS3, it would be totally blind without being able to see what traffic is coming out of that host (which has tunnels of many of my users coming out).

As I expected, the list blocks Google ads. If everyone downloaded this list and used AdBlock, Google would die. In case you did not know it, 99.99% of Google's income is from Google ads, based on their public reports for share holders, etc. Blocking obtrusive ads is justified. Blocking any other ads is not. Did you ever stop to think who's going to pay the bandwidth costs of sites that depend on income from ads? The more popular a site is, the more incredible bandwidth fees they pay (popular sites can't use free hosting, mainly due to their bandwidth needs, etc). Without ads, sites like SourceForge.net or Slashdot.com would have to charge everyone for reading or die too. Think twice before blocking unobtrusive ads. Mass selfishness could bring many popular free sites to an end.

If all you care for is streaming, try last.fm. It's free for anyone to use, and it's perfect for discovering new artists since it recommends bands based on your listening habits. It even lets you adjust the recommendations via a popularity-slider, which is great if you're more into lesser known bands. Every user gets several custom radio streams of their own (that anyone can listen to, and you can listen to theirs), and subscribers get a few more. There are all kinds of neat features, like tag-radio, social groups, editable artist wikis, etc.

Audioscrobbler started off as a school project, but after a while, they went commercial, and are now last.fm.

Last fm is a standalone player that implements the Audioscrobbler functionality. Audioscrobbler is STILL available in plugin form for Winamp, iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Perhaps the submitter is a dolt but at least he read the fucking page.

(Last fm == Standalone player) && (Audioscrobbler == plugin)

LK

Audioscrobbler started off as a school project, but after a while, they went commercial, and are now last.fm.

Last fm is a standalone player that implements the Audioscrobbler functionality. Audioscrobbler is STILL available in plugin form for Winamp, iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Perhaps the submitter is a dolt but at least he read the fucking page.

(Last fm == Standalone player) && (Audioscrobbler == plugin)

LK

Audioscrobbler started off as a school project, but after a while, they went commercial, and are now last.fm.

Last fm is a standalone player that implements the Audioscrobbler functionality. Audioscrobbler is STILL available in plugin form for Winamp, iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Perhaps the submitter is a dolt but at least he read the fucking page.

(Last fm == Standalone player) && (Audioscrobbler == plugin)

LK

Audioscrobbler started off as a school project, but after a while, they went commercial, and are now last.fm.

Last fm is a standalone player that implements the Audioscrobbler functionality. Audioscrobbler is STILL available in plugin form for Winamp, iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Perhaps the submitter is a dolt but at least he read the fucking page.

(Last fm == Standalone player) && (Audioscrobbler == plugin)

LK

your retarded myspace page says that your musical interests are as follows: Thursday, Flogging Molly, The Academy Is..., Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, Panic! At The Disco, Green Day, Brand New, The Matches, Elliott Smith, The Hush Sound.

your last.fm profile backs this up.
you have shitty taste in music, even if you hate itunes. you're an emo faggot, and you buy major label discs just like all the other emo faggots, while feeling high-and-mighty about it. whiny adults acting like whiny teens? no thanks. no have no license to an opinion on music, you smug little prick. kids like you are more loathesome than the corporations you pretend not to support. suck a dick.

Your stats are nice, but I think they maybe a bit wobbley as the winamp plug-in is unreliable.

I reported that the Winamp plugin doesn't always detect a track being played in the Winamp plugin forum about 6 months ago, but this is still unfixed. For me this means that some days I can play litterally hundreds of tracks, and none of them get submitted. This is still an issue today, and other people see it too:

    http://www.last.fm/forum/3/_/111243

I'm not sure what is going on with the winamp plugin, but it seems that there is a 1.1.10 'official' version, but also a 1.1.11 'DrO' version. Neither of them work fully, and because of this winamp users are probably going under represented, hence skewing your stats.

It's also unclear who is supporting the Winamp plugin, and where the latest source code (if available) can be found. It looks like DrO isn't able to do it anymore :(

http://nunzioweb.com/daz/index.html#Current%20News

Please make the plugin reliable!!!

I'll start by saying that I'm a huge fan of Last.fm, and have been for years. I'm addicted to the place, and my music collection would be nothing without it. While Last.fm does have a feature where artists are automatically recommended to you, I rarely use it. It's the social aspect of Last.fm that sets it apart. The best way of getting recommendations is just simply asking for them.

I've used Pandora a few times before, and was always disappointed with what it recomended. Results are mixed to say the least—it clearly works better for some types of music than others—and some of the recommendations can be, quite frankly, laughable.

So, seeing as I work at Last.fm (I founded audioscrobbler), I feel obliged to pimp my last.fm journal, which has some interesting stats (imo) about which media players are most popular, and some graphs of artist popularity. I intend to do a "google trends for music" interface after the next site update (see below).

The KDE player Amarok is getting increasingly popular, which is nice to see. I use it myself; the built in support means no plugin is required. The next version of amarok adds lots more last.fm integration too.

Coming up - we'll be running a beta test of a fairly major update to last.fm towards the end of june, and going live with the new version 1st July.

And a random stat: we currently recieve on average 104 submissions per second from audioscrobbler plugins.

There are two things I use for "renting" music. Because I view renting as listening before I buy. That way I can keep the ones I love forever and drop the crap that sucks. The first one is http://www.pandora.com/. It's awesome for finding similar types of music using it's own techinique. The second is http://www.last.fm/. It requires an install, so not too handy at work, but it bases your preferences off other people. And it shows all the songs you have listened to and how many times. I use the blend, http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/, so it picks similar songs, but I still get the points in last.fm for listening to it and chat with other people about what they like. Plus at work I don't want to install the last.fm player, so the in-browser playback is nifty. And it's freeeee~ And thus I have infinite amounts of music to listen to and try, and I only have to buy a small(ish) amount that I want to have at all times.