When one service dies, another rises up in its place. It’s the circle of life for music on the internet.

That I can recount at least a rough history of music on the internet shows my age. My own experiences started with downloading .wav and even .midi files. I remember when mp3s hit the “mainstream” – by early 1998 (a lifetime ago in internet time) it was crucial in the leak of “Given to Fly.” Full albums then became widely available through FTP, regulated through upload/download ratios.

P2P revolutionized things of course, with the simple setup offered by Napster, which hit in the last year of high school and was widely adopted by the time I got to university.

When Napster [effectively] died, I moved onto Audiogalaxy, which was a godsend for finding rare tracks. Unfortunately the service went under fairly quickly (once it gained popularity it also gained the eye of the RIAA).

When the Gnutella network held rule, Morpheus took up some space on my hard drive, then Kazaa before it succumb to the money offered by adware/spyware vendors. eDonkey 2000 takes the cake for the most ridiculous name of the bunch, though it provided the most functionality of any program I’ve ever used, combining the Gnutella network with Overnet and torrent capabilities, so it did have something going for it.

Torrents eventually replaced everything else. Azureus Vuze was my primary software, but even that happens to be gone from my system these days.

Others that came and went? Ares, iMesh, WinMX, Soulseek and even LimeWire. There are probably one or two others that I simply can’t remember.

Nowadays it’s all about the web services. I’ve never been a fan of MySpace, nor imeem, nor iLike. I never got around to trying Pandora. My website of choice thus far has been Last.fm. The “scrobbling” feature is fantastic, as are the statistics derived from it. The automatically generated recommendations have proven useful for my discovery of new artists and songs. Unfortunately they’ll be charging users for radio access from now on, so I’ll have to look elsewhere for my new music fix.

Signs are looking good that my new favourite toy will be The Sixty One (www.thesixtyone.com), which provides me with internet radio and still scrobbles.

Adrian from Last.fm weighed in a week back with his take on the site’s Top Tracks charts over the past few weeks. The problem for Adrian is that Radiohead has dominated the charts since the release of “In Rainbows” in October – an incredible span that has obscured any gains made by other artists that might show up were the boys from Oxford not included.

I don’t share his distaste. That Radiohead has held such a monopoly on things is an incredible statement about the quality of music nowadays and about their promotion and distribution model. …and quite frankly, it’s refreshing to see a chart that reflects actual listening, rather than what some Clear Channel employee is getting paid to play.

Nothing has been able to supplant the band because nothing has been able to reach that critical mass. Kanye West and Amy Winehouse have done well with “Stronger” and “Rehab” respectively, but they don’t represent anything earth-shattering. And only two songs? That’s the challenge that’s been mounted? That’s more an indication of the dearth of hit singles out there than anything else.

“Hits” notwithstanding (and let’s face it, the week before Radiohead’s hold began, Oasis’ “Wonderwall” was eighth on the chart; now it’s fifteenth – the chart has only ever given a slight indication of “what’s now”), Radiohead has been able to get their songs (or rather a complete album; they’re not shilling singles here) into the hands of more listeners. Their free distribution model has worked amazingly. They’ve removed the barriers to entry. As such, don’t be surprised if Nine Inch Nails makes at least a small dent next week with songs from Ghosts I-IV.

I’m a sociologist by profession (or rather, I would be, were I to finish my thesis project) who studies migration, and so I’ve a particular interest for matters of geography. Or perhaps it’s the other way around – my family has a diplomatic background (my grandfather and uncle have both served as Canadian ambassadors abroad) and so there were always atlases lying around… The connection is there either way.

Which brings me to Last.fm. How do my listening habits break down geographically? Of my Top 200 artists, 13 countries are represented. How do these stack up? Well, let’s consider that I’m Canadian, a country right next door to a country 10x the size my own and known worldwide for its entertainment industry, and that I’m an anglophile who basically spent a year following bands around the UK and Ireland (under the guise of a university education). So it should come as no surprise that the three countries most represented are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Following that, we have Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, Iceland, France and others.

Iceland is fairly easy to explain – it holds a spot close to my heart; I was married in Reykjavik – the first music we listened to after exchanging our vows ("já, það geri ég" for the curious) was Sigur Rós. The fact that it’s a very prolific country in terms of creative output (nearly every Icelander is a published author by the time they die) might also have something to do with it. Sweden (Kent, The Cardigans, Jay-Jay Johanson, Swod, etc.) on the other hand? I have no personal connection, so I can only assume that like Iceland it is very prolific in the arts.

[originally posted to Last.fm, 14 Feb 2008]

I’m still fairly recent to the notion of tags on Last.fm. As such, I’m still debating how useful they really are in a community setting. The issue is one of personal use versus applicability to a more general audience.

For purposes of discovery, identifying something as “indie” (as over 100,000 Last.fm users have been wont to do) doesn’t really help. The tag is simply too vague, too plain, too nothing. [Not to mention that it has somehow been taken to represent a certain sound (personally, I blame the British), rather than simply denoting the distribution channels by which an album is sold.]

Conversely, my way of doing things is also flawed in its specificity. Not many users are tagging their songs with 6-word tags (“songs with that classic feel to them” being my tag of choice). My stance was originally quite self-absorbed – a lack of consideration for the greater community. My tags were created moreso [not a "real" word, but English is of human genesis, and so I'll let those tomes of gathered words catch up] as playlists.

For the creators of Last.fm, this maybe isn’t of great importance – their definition of tagging in the FAQ is fairly broad (and rightly so), encompassing both of the above exemples.

So what’s the problem? The design of the Last.fm site includes a tag box in the top-righthand corner of each track or artist page – meaning that there is at least some degree of implicit interest in the behavioural patterns of users when it comes to tagging – downplaying the applicability of the FAQ’s example of ‘singers Sarah would like.’

The tag box seems to include the most popular of terms used to denote a specific track, meaning that tags inapplicable to the community aren’t displayed by default …but of course this brings back the problem of vagueness. Some of the more descriptive, and therefore valuable, tags are another click away. According to the tag box for The World Is Mine by Hooverphonic, the song is electronic trip-hop, featuring a female vocalist. Yes. Well, that accurately describes Hooverphonic, but it doesn’t really give me any indication of what the song evokes. Clicking further, we discover tags such as ‘cabaret,’ ‘uptempo’ and ‘dance all over your face,’ hardly what we would have expected from the most popular tags, which were so all-encompassing that they could have just as well described Massive Attack.

How can we fix it? Why not feature both the popular tags and those that aren’t quite as popular in the tag box? Add some richness to the data. Don’t just aggregate the results.

[originally posted to Last.fm, 11 Feb 2008]

I must admit that I find listening charts to be Last.fm’s most endearing feature. It’s a bit of self-adulation, a narcissistic stare, a reflection of my most overwhelmingly defeating character traits (but the world does, after all, revolve around me, doesn’t it?).

Now, nearly a year after originally signing up, my views are changing, if ever so slightly. I have discovered that Last.fm is something so much more than simply a chart-service. It is also a radio station, a recommendation engine; such obvious statements to be sure, yet ones whose profundities I hadn’t probed until recently – awareness does not equate appreciation.

It was a song by Giant Drag that served as the slight push that set me into sway (both influence and rocking, naturally). For this was a band of musicians and storytellers that I could enjoy. Likewise, Detektivbyrån somehow fit perfectly with Swod and all others using children’s instruments (or at least sounding like they do).

So now a plauditory and articulatory gesture, a recognition of the work that the Last.fm team has put in: Thank you. More power to the databases and the algorithm, I say.

…but then this begs the question, is it better than a personal endorsement? This was always the debate in the days before Pandora lost the royalty war and Last.fm was snatched up by CBS (I’m pleasantly surprised that the free-thinking and resistive spirit of Johnny Fever – bonus points if you immediately recognize the reference – has remained in face of such a corporate giant).

I ask the question because today I read a review of the new album from Sons and Daughters that was equally revelatory. The written word was just as effective as the Last.fm radio (which is to say, often miss-hit-miss-miss) in providing incentive to listen/download/buy.

Perhaps a worthy debate, but perhaps a bit of tail-chasing. Perhaps an indication that the old ways will never die. Perhaps an indication that both have merit and that sometimes we don’t have to choose.

[originally posted to Last.fm, 29 Jan 2008]