From a random person on deli.cio.us comes a new way to waste hours and hours — and it’s musical: Audioscrobbler. Audioscrobbler is a music player plugin that coordinates with a central website to transmit and track your listening preferences, then connect you with other music you might also like. No music is exchanged — it’s just about metadata. Users can club together into groups and aggregate all their playlists. There’s also a forum function so that scrobblers can comment on any song, artist, and other scrobbler they like. Audioscrobbler very consciously draws on the Amazon principles — but what they don’t say is that they’ve also learned the lessons of various YASNS.
They're also using the metaphor of the neighborhood, which I like -- I'm assuming it's borrowed from blogstreet. Your neighborhood is your favourite artists, friends, and people with similar music taste to you. It only really gets interesting with the Neighborhood Gossip option: Show me similar gossip that may be interesting to this user' (Though I haven’t gotten this feature to work yet.)
The social causes and effects of automatically publishing playlists on a website for strangers to view is especially interesting because it’s inherently tied to real-world decisions, albeit on a micro level. Every single track listed in my profile is there because at some point I pressed "play." Unlike, say, Friendster, where there’s no way to know whether I’ve actually read all the books I claim as favorites, there’s no faking it with Audioscrobbler. Thus, the requirements for joining groups actually have some numerical weight:
Membership requirements: 200 songs scrobbled, at least 8 of your top 20 scrobbled artists must have been part of the 80's rock/metal scene.
More than 5 grunge or nu-metal bands anywhere in your top list will disqualify you from this group by default for having poor taste. :-P This group is for true fans of 80's rock only.*
I’m slowly getting addicted to watching my profile update itself. Tonight I decided that I need to do some image-maintenance so that I look a little less 1994-indie-centric than I really am. Obviously, we can all think of ten ways to game this system before breakfast. But that’s the point: even by trying to game it, you’ve already bought into its comprehensibility and its values.
Audioscrobbler works so well because it never prompts me to enter track names or artists. Instead, it draws its (relatively harmless)** data dynamically from everyday activities. Combine it with I Love Music, the best music-based community (and I use that word very advisedly) ever, and I would be hooked forever.
*This group only has one member, natch.
** Or is it harmless to know for sure that Anil Dash wen through a big Prince phase? In the interests of fairness, I will admit that my own musical tastes are fairly indefensible.
