Four years on Last.fm

Name: v11v11v (quick abstraction of eleventhvolume)
Joined: 15th December 2004
108435 tracks played in total (at 11.28pm last night)
74 tracks per day, average
3,889 artists played
863 loved tracks
66 friends
177 shouts

Top 10 artists

• Kraftwerk (3,723)
• Scott Walker (2,622)
• Rhythm & Sound (2,126)
• King Tubby (1,882)
• Ornette Coleman (1,517)
• Jon Hassell (1,475)
• Miles Davis (1,363)
• Jazzanova (1,299)
• Arve Henriksen (1,133)
• Johann Sebastian Bach (1,076)

Top 10 tracks

• Jon Hassell, Maarifa Street (79 plays) – it’s my top track because I have two live versions and the album track all titled the same)
• 2-10 are all tracks from Kraftwerk’s Minimum Maximum. Their titles have the location of the performance added e.g. Tour De France Etape One (Riga) means that the number of times I’ve listened to the song is less than the total – I’ve listened to the studio version 53 times.

Miscellaneous thoughts

• At times I check my Last.fm page far too frequently, though less so since I hit 100,000 tracks. The impulse relates to registering the experience of something temporal that otherwise passes unmarked like clouds in the sky.
• I play Last.fm stations at work most days, predominantly choosing My Library (which is frustratingly much more limited and repetitive than my actual listening). Other times I choose Similar Artists radio and occasionally Recommendations. I’ve yet to find a particularly satisfactory one. I’d probably use Pandora as often, but it’s blocked outside the US now.
• I have yet to buy any music through the site and I use AdBlock to banish ads. I wonder how well they’re monetising Last.fm.
• I wish Last.fm facilitated easy retrieval of my stats. I really like Last Graph‘s visualisations of Last.fm data as seen at the top of this post.
• The Last.fm charts horrify me, forever dominated by Coldplay, Radiohead and The Beatles.
• The site redesign fails to support Last.fm’s objective to build community around music: I eventually gave up looking for how to send a membership invite to a friend, the shouts are too far down the page and it’s not obvious how to add friends.
• I really like Flag counter which I installed in my sidebar recently. It records the different nationalities that have anonymously visited my profile:
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• I’d miss Last.fm a lot if I didn’t have it!