Last.fm: number of tracks vs. time played

What I find a bit weird about how last.fm tracks listening trends, is that they only use the number of times you played a certain track. I always felt that this would favour bands that create shorter songs. A band with a average song lengths of 7 minutes will only get half as much scrobbles (in last.fm jargon) as a a band with average song lengths of 3,5 minutes. I used to wonder what effect this would have on my charts.

I must not have been the only one, because when I was looking at the build.last.fm page, my eye caught the last.fm normalizer tool. This tool will take your top 50 artists and rerank them according to the estimated time that you listened to them (more info can be found on the tool's site). Looking at my normalized top 50 artists, there are no big drops, but there are a few big rises. Wolves in the Throne Room gains 20(!) places, Red Sparowes and Evoken gains 15 places, and they are all in my top 15 now. This matches much more to my gut feeling of what I have been listening to the last few months.

It's the fault of last.fm

Starting this blog is the fault of last.fm.

Earlier this year, I read a news item about them planning on allowing streaming music of bands and giving them money back for it. This seemed interesting enough to go ahead and make an account. I was pleasantly surprised at all these features they offered. I didn't know that you could log all the music that you listened. Then they use this info to link you to other people that listen to the same bands. You can register with groups and get recommendations from people therein. You can tag the bands that you like. And best of all, just about all data of your profile is available through feeds. I have already seen some cool uses of all this info. They even went so far as to build a separate site to group all these plugins (some that they made themselves, and some more that were made by users of the site).

Anyways, one of the other features that they provide, is a journal that you can make. I wrote one post on my journal about the cd's I already bought this year, and I thought: "why not start a blog instead and be more flexible?". And that's how this blog got started. It's the fault of last.fm ;-)

Intro...

When you turn on your cd player, do you hear raging guitars, pounding drums, and screaming vocals? And most of all, do you hear them loud?

Then you came to the right place!

Metal is a part of my life and of who I am. This blog is meant as a way of
expressing how I feel about what happens in this scene.

I don't care about genres and styles. I have favourite bands in everything from black metal to nu metal, from post-rock to melodic death. Everything goes, as long as it's played from the heart and brought with passion. If you want to know what I'm listening to, you can check out my last.fm profile.

Horns Up!