Last.fm

http://www.last.fm

Last.fm is hours of fun. I'm sure most of you know it at least a little bit, but if you don't, I'll explain. It uses a plugin to chart what you listen to, and spits back graphs and statistics about your most played artists and songs by week, month, and overall. It's wonderfully geeky. And the even better part is that it compares what you listen to with what others listen to, and comes up with "Musical Neighbors". And from those Neighbors, it then recommends you artists that you may not have heard of yet. (In my experience, though, most of those recommendations are artists you've listened to in the past and decided you've not liked.) Last.fm also runs streaming Internet radio, and has some free full-length mp3 downloads where artists have allowed it.

And what's even cooler in my opinion--the Last.fm code is open-source, so people can make all sorts of fun Last.fm add-ons. Learn all about the guts behind Last.fm at Audioscrobbler. See below for fun add-ons:

Mainstream-O-Meter: calculates how mainstream you are in relation to other Last.fm users. Great for pretentious indie kids who judge music based on its relative obscurity or hipness rather then whether or not it's good. A pleasant diversion for the rest of us.

Musical preferences with tag clouds: Does what it says it does.

Upcomingscrobbler: Finds upcoming concerts by your most-played artists.

Last.fm Normaliser: I really like this one. Last.fm figures out its charts based on the number of times you play a given track/artist. So punchy pop/rock bands who put 15 three-minute songs on an album are always higher up on charts than jazz musicians who create albums with 4 really long, multi-movement songs. This figures out who and what is most played by estimating how long you've spent listening in time. Not an exact science but it's pretty accurate.

The point is...if we choose to pursue the musical route, doing something with Audioscrobbler code might be a good idea. There are plenty of simple apps as well as complex ones (follow the Audioscrobbler link above and go to the Wiki page to see more apps). Music nerds love their last.fm (including me), these are a logical extension that require nothing from users except their username.