Small, but interesting Last.FM discovery

Image of top list window
[fig.1]

Image of further last fm window
[fig.2]

Well it’s interesting to me… Further to a previous post expressing frustration at the single track, rather than album-centric nature of Last.FM’s lists; I was looking at the ‘top lists (local)’ pop-up window [fig.1] accessed from the menu bar if the icon’s enabled, and noticed for the first time a little button at the bottom. Clicking it revealed a new window [fig.2] that actually displays total time spent listening to individual artists. If it’s reflected here, does that mean Last.FM’s capturing this information and could create charts based upon the key criteria of time spent listening rather than number of tracks heard. No sign, sadly, of albums being captured, but I guess that would represent a more complex challenge of marrying tracks heard to album track listings, etc. This is, in a small way, promising, but then perhaps it’s always been there, I’ve never noticed it and Last.FM don’t intend to do anything about it. Who knows. Here’s that profile page in full. Correction: I’ve just looked at the bottom of that page and there’s a listing of the top albums which nicely points up the absurdity of the current way of compiling the charts - I listened to John Fahey’s Hitomi (21 tracks) for a total of 2:41:04, but it’s third to Robert Johnson’s The Complete Collection (29 tracks) with a total of 1:16:13 - less than half the amount of time spent listening. Okay, there’s counter arguments to my preferred approach e.g. it could be argued that I’ve elected to listen to Robert Johnson 29 times rather than 21 times, etc, etc. Er, I think I’m going on about this for much too long, so I’m going to stop now…

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Published:
18.04.06 / 9pm
Category:
internet, music, music interfaces, software