Anxiety. Anxieties.

Hello and welcome to yet another thrilling installment of my blog, todays topic (yes I am aware, that this is my third post in one day, but in the world of blogging its free game!) is music. Music, but more specifically the social software targeted at the online music listening community, such as Last.fm

For twelve months I was actively participating in last.fm by listening to music on a regular basis, adding show information, posting in shoutbox's and making friends with people with a similar taste in music to me. This was up until a few weeks ago where I finally decided to delete my account and cease scrobbling.

To accurately explain my reasons for ending my participation I shall first explain the general concept and purpose of last.fm. The program operates seemingly anonymously with your default music player (iTunes, winamp, media player etc) and keeps note of the tracks you play through a process known as 'scrobbling'.


With this, the program keeps a recorded online history of your recently listened tracks, weekly top artists, overall top artists and overall most played songs in a public profile.





From here, last.fm suggests new artists for you to listen to that have been deemed as a 'similar artist' to those you listen to most frequently. Therefore, last.fm is an excellent way to discover new music. Based upon your charts last.fm also reveal other users with similar listening patterns as you, allowing social potential with like-minded users.

However, whilst proving itself as an excellent source of new music and social networking possibilities, the website has a few downsides, which in turn drove me to leave the site. Due to the tallying nature of overall top tracks, some users view the statistics as a competition. Hereby challenging to be a particular artists 'weekly top listener' and have their profile displayed on the bands page. Users also compete against each other, claiming to be bigger fans of certain bands.

For example these are actual comments received in my shout box:

user: i betz i've listened to moar Thrice than you this week!@!@



user: 400 plays for Trophy Scars last week, not to mention the 480 for .Moneen. ^___^ You don't even come close to matching me suckaaaaa.

Are you starting to share my disdain? Users such as this also feel the need to 'cheat' or falsify their charts by leaving their music playing at all possible moments during the day to ensure a high weekly tally. Which I might point out, achieves nothing! As previously mentioned last.fm allows users to comment on artists, albums, songs and users profiles. This can be harmless discussion of a concert, new album release or lyrics to a song, but often it results in all out verbal sparring between users about how much a band suck, how bad they are live or how emo they are. Which in reality can create a pretty negative environment and isolate many users.

It was a combination of these things that led to my eventual deletion of the software from my computer. However, I may no longer use the software, but I certainly use the website as a source of artist information and to find similar artists. The site is essentially designed to best accommodate users with active profiles, but is not exclusive. Anyone can visit the website and perform a search and be provided with links to both the artist they are searching for, similar artists pages and opportunities to listen/download or purchase the music online. The website, although no longer scrobbling my data, is still a highly relevant and useful social software and networking website.

[My intentions not to leave you coming back for more
It’s a game. It’s a game. It’s fun.
See you later, adios and have fun]