Socialising mp3-based music listening

Though I signed up over a year ago, it's only in the last month of so that I've begun to really use the fantastic Audioscrobbler. Basically, a discrete plugin which keeps track of what music you're playing (in iTunes, WinAmp, WMA9, XMMS &c) and then aggregates that on a personal page at audioscrobbler.com (here's mine). I think it uses Musicbrainz - the 'community music metadatabase' - as a 'back-end', such that clicking on a song will fairly accurately show who else is a fan of that song. As Phil Gyford notes, this comparison ability is darn good for discovery. The author, Richard Jones, is now adding some social software-like features: friends, groups etc. It's very cool.

Of course, you could use this notion of 'friends' as part of a music recommendations system, as I mentioned recently, in addition to the aggregation of broad patterns via collaborative filtering. A potential limitation with Audioscrobbler's implementation of friends at the moment is that it wouldn't enable me distinguish a friend whose musical taste I trust (and would want my recommendations to be more weighted by) from a friend whose musical taste I either don't trust or just don't want to affect my recommendation. With some of these minor modifications, a more complex recommendation model is within reach though, built around combining collaborative filtering with a way of weighting the scores from 'friends with similar or interesting tastes'. With music (and perhaps other similar cultural fields), in any given social group (whether <5, <50, or <150), there's always those whose job it is to make the mixtapes, to DJ at parties, to share their playlists, who others turn to for music recommendations. Combine that complex local knowledge with the blunter tool of 'the math' (as Lucas Gonze notes in the comments at Many2Many) by passing collaborative filtering over these enormous aggregations of data from systems like these, and we could be on to something.

Leaving aside the patterns in other people's 'scrobbling for a moment, as my Audioscrobbler page developed over time I started observing my listening. And now my obsession has got to the stage where I've been 'teaching' it, 'seeding' the system with a fair representation of what I'm into by leaving a 'Top Rated' playlist running overnight in iTunes' party shuffle mode. This is quite odd behaviour if you think about it - playing music not to listen to, but to ensure that Audioscrobbler has a decent understanding of who I am, musically. As Tom Coates astutely pointed out, it's another aspect of presentation of self. Which means it's quite important (as well as being not a little self-regarding, obviously ;)

It's got to the stage where I'm actually slightly disappointed to think that all the listening I do out on the street or cafe with my iPod isn't being recorded by Audioscrobbler. So it's only a part-presentation of self - only part of me is being recorded/transmitted here - my listening at home.

Actually, here's the opportunity for Apple.

Obviously, across their connected music infrastructure of iPod, iTunes, and iTMS  they're tracking all those play counts too. iTunes could do everything 'Scrobbler's currently doing - the networks, the artist lists, the groups, the friends. You could have your personal page at Apple (or rather, within iTunes), keeping a track of your most-listened to artists/tracks - and then publish it within that infrastructure. Then simply extend that with some relatively straightforward features to enable adding friends and localised groups. Again, add some indication of how much you want particular friend's listening habits to affect your recommendations (i.e. 'let David affect my recommendations this much; Matt this much etc.) Then mix up with the massive collaborative filtering potential based around a distributed world of listeners ('spyware' issues perhaps, ones that Audioscrobbler neatly sidesteps). Moreover, Apple have a post-browser application which could handle presence too (via integration with iChat) - akin to what iChatStatus already does, but within iTunes - people listening to the same track right now; your friends and what they're listening to etc.

(Obviously, this will work better - or actually work - once Apple have 'fixed' their feature of play counts and ratings from your iPod not actually being synched if you manually manage your tracks and playlists. Sort it, Apple!)

[ Another thought on the new iTunes, while we're on it: shared playlists ahem iMixes - absolutely fantastic feature, but why not do an Amazon Associate-style cut for those whose playlists get bought? That'd be a great incentive. But the publishing of it is fantastic right there, with huge potential. Another more subtle feature is that of enabling playlists to be based around playlists - it's almost getting SQL-like power here i.e. do a select from 'ECM's :rarum series' playlist where rating is five stars and date added is in last 3 months &c. ]

So, there are huge opportunities for Apple ahead, if they want to go that way. Though what 'Scrobbler does of course is accept, aggregate, and publish all that detail cross-platform, from multiple plug-ins/media players, and then make that super-accessible over http/html - which is very smart (and yet, it does hamper it when it comes to denoting presence, and browser-based solutions just can't match the kind of quick music browsing/searching that iTunes/iTMS was built for, due to its post-browser incarnation).

But this post started about features available right now, and within Audioscrobbler. In fact, it's currently something of a victim of its own success, creaking under the strain a bit, so I'm somewhat loathe to point more people at it. However, part of the reason I'm writing is to suggest people donate to Audioscrobbler!. They need another fast database server, and I reckon that's a good cause. Paypal etc will do it. Whatever Apple do with iTunes, Audioscrobbler is out there breaking new ground right here, right now.

Please donate to Audioscrobbler today!

Comments

[Phil Gyford]

I thought I was something of a freak for being annoyed that my iPod listening wasn't being announced via iChat and logged on AudioScrobbler. Until I mentioned it to Coates and he agreed. And now I read you feel something similar.

Hopefully this all means I'm *less* of a freak :)

[gavin]

All those social software sites invariably ask for your "Favorite Music" and I can never just enter a band or two or three (who can?) so I think from now on I'll just post a url, http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/xgavin/ and be done with it. A big chunk of your personality easily accessed by a simple location.

[Tom Coates]

Yeah except dude, you're listening to too much Level 42! Do you really want people to know that!?

[Scott Sanders]

If you're not opposed to listening to new music, Last.fm uses the same system Audioscrobbler does but for personalized, collaborative Internet radio. You can even sign in there with your Audioscrobbler login and share the same music log and settings.

I mention Last.fm in particular because there are two kinds of user relationships at Last.fm, neighbors and friends. The friends system works the same as at Audioscrobbler. Neighbors, however, do influence the music you hear, and you can rely on Last.fm's neighborhood calculation system and/or add your own neighbors.

http://www.last.fm/

And I'm certain that the neighborhood system will be brought to Audioscrobbler eventually, as both sites have swapped features with each other since they got together a while ago.

Regarding a "post-browser" experience with Audioscrobbler:

You can subscribe to an RSS feed that displays the track you're listening to now and your most recent tracks at Audioscrobbler and Last.fm. Here's your feed: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/rdf/history/cityofsound

I suppose you could subscribe to your friends' feeds as well.

Also, one user is beta-testing an app called FriendScrobbler that will work similar to legacy instant messaging clients in that you have a buddy list and can see what your buddies are listening to with Audioscrobbler or Last.fm.

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/forum/28/_/2660

-Scott

[Aaron]

I've mentioned this in the comments area of your site before - maybe you didn't see. iTunes will let you manually manage the songs on your iPod and keep a record of what you listen to on it. Set the Ipod to update manually, and then use the check boxes to decide what goes on the pod. Then everytime you sync the data on what you've been listening to gets sync-ed both ways. Easy when you know how. Unless your music library is hugely bigger than your pod, in which case you'll have a lot of deselected music.. it's not perfect, but it works.

[Tom Coates]

It's not really much of a solution though - I mean I've got 25 Gb of music on my computer and an iPod that can only fit 5Gb on it. If I were to untick my music I'd have 5000 songs that I wasn't able to play at home. I'm sure there is a very good reason why it is the way it is, but at the moment from the outside it does rather look like an oversight rather than a genuinely difficult thing to implement properly.

[Aaron]

Agreed, it's a much less useful solution if you're dealing with a 5GB pod, and something Apple should sort out.

[andrew]

An inventive user at Mac OSX Hints describes his (and it's always a "him", isn't it) approach to deeper organization of his iTunes:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040503122142715

[Timo]

New subscriptions are now closed, too much strain on the server.

I really want to give it a try, even downloaded the plugin this evening.

[Alex]

It’s a pity it is closed. Hope they can accept new subscription soon.

[Dan]

Trackbacks on this post, received at the time (before I turned trackbacks off due to spam):

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