by JAY WATTS III

I’d come upon this U.K.-based site when it was called Audioscrobbler, and offered free raw-data dumps that would provide oodles of information on the listening habits of their users, sorted by location, artist, album or whatever other criteria an enterprising young geek might want to apply. They’ve since morphed into last.fm (http://www.last.fm), and the data available to the rank-and-file user is no more substantial than their weekly charts, which list top tracks and top artists.

The charts are nothing spectacular, proving that nerdy white people listen to nerdy white music (hip hop is represented only twice in last week’s top 100, by Gnarls Barkley and Black Eyed Peas, widely considered the voice of contemporary ghetto life), but as a substantially more accurate way to gauge what people are listening to and where, if it caught on, it could be far more powerful than the Soundscan system (which tracks sales through retailers), or iTunes charts, seeing as the system tracks more than just sales.

Given that this is 2006, it has the obligatory “online community” element too, the upside being that you can track down all 28 fans of This Heat, the downside being that, well, they can track you down, too.

Other features of the site include journals, Wiki-like band descriptions and the major element, a personalized radio player programmed utilizing some sort of “intuitive software” hooey which strikes me as having such a high possibility of fucking up and sending me a playlist made up of Black Dice B-sides and Grateful Dead jams that I’d rather not investigate. And, like Brit-crit Simon Reynolds pointed out on his blog (http://blissout.blogspot.com) a while back, the majority of music I listen to on my computer doesn’t reflect my actual tastes—promos from Saskatchewan math-rock trios and such.

As another way for marketers to dig at a coveted demographic, the net-connected teenager, this shows promise, but for my own research, I prefer the old-fashioned manner—heading down to the Bibliotheque Nationale and snooping through other people's iTunes on the wireless network

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