5 ms·

For me, it's still primarily http://last.fm/ http://last.fm/ 's similar artist feature.

• deleted 10y ago
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• Declanomous 10y ago
  I've had the opposite experience with Last.fm. I actually realized last week that my scrobbling was broken, and I wasn't particularly disappointed. Last.fm used to be a place where I could check out bands I had never heard of. It was like the website equivalent of the friend who spends all day listening to new music, and will recommend music that is eerily perfect for you. I feel like the "similar artists" function has changed to prioritize artists that are already extremely popular, even if a much less popular artists is much more similar to the band you are currently listening to. It's plausible I know a lot more bands than I used to, and that new bands are inherently less novel to me. However, I believe this is a trend that can be followed across almost all websites. As evidence, you only need to look at the changes Facebook made in the same time period. They study the interactions their users make as much as any company, and they've ensured that their users spend the most time on Facebook and provide them with as much data as possible. Facebook used to show every update on the new feed. Now I rarely see posts from anyone I disagree with. I used to get a lot of my information about bands from their Facebook groups. Now the only updates I get are from the major companies I've liked, because they can pay to send a message. I totally understand why large websites are doing this. These services are most profitable as an advertising platform. In the case of Last.fm, the people listening to John Doe and the Backup Band aren't going to make them money. This 'cultivation' has an extremely chilling effect on the variety and depth of news, viewpoints, etc. that allowed the internet to foster an explosion in creative expression.
  • Jenya_ 10y ago
    there is some new music on http://www.thesixtyone.com/ http://www.thesixtyone.com/, the site came back to life again at the beginning of this year.
• CuriouslyC 10y ago
  The problem with last.fm (and almost all similar music services) is that a lot of the similarity they encapsulate is chronological and social similarity, rather than musical similarity. For example, a search for Nirvana pulls up Hole (social similarity, the Courtney Love connection) and Pearl Jam (social & chronological similarity) quite high on the list, even though neither really sounds that much like Nirvana. On the other hand, The Pixies, which are musically much closer to Nirvana aren't even on the list.
  • btilly 10y ago
    How do you measure similarity to capture what you want? The obvious approach is that you look for "people who like this, like that". This is easy to measure and understand. And when you're faced with a person who liked this, it is usually the right answer. The problem is that you don't know WHY people who like this, like that. Often it is simply, "Heard both at an impressionable age." What you want it to be is, "On the musical criteria that I can recognize, this music is similar." But that's a complex piece of logic, and it is not clear how to do so. Which makes the tools really good for rediscovering all of the stuff from your childhood, and really bad for discovering new music that is similar to stuff you like.
    • Grishnakh 10y ago
      You do it by objectively analyzing the music from a technical standpoint. That's how last.fm started; it was someone's research project to look for "musical DNA" and then use that "signature" to find similar music. It actually worked well.
      • dublinben 10y ago
        Pandora is actually the site that was borne out of the music DNA project.