Tuesday, March 21, 2006
The Future Sound of Jukeboxes
Physical State: bendy
Mental State: foggy
Music: Ladytron - Witching Hour - ("International Dateline" my favourite new single)
Fashion sense: grey t-shirt, jeans
Word of the day
kvetch
n. A chronic, whining complainer.
A nagging complaint: “a rambling kvetch against the system” (Leonard Ross).
***
Ironically I have nothing to complain about today unless you can count the college strike that has been on for two weeks already. One thing I have to applaud is the great website last.fm. This site is incredible because it's kind of a six degrees of myspace meets pandora. It tracks the stuff you listen to in itunes over the week and shows you your most played artists on your personal page. It also gives you links to people (or neighbours) who have similar tastes. One of the best features for me though is the last.fm player and it's similar artist radio station where you type in an artist and it finds you similar artists and streams complete songs (ALL DAY if you want it to!). So if you put in Ladytron say it would find other artists that sound like Ladytron (but often it goes pretty wide to include things like singers who sound like Helen Marnie, maybe some Raymond Scott, Astrud Gilberto, the Logan's Run soundtrack...etc.). It's like having a cool jukebox with amazing stuff on it. It also turns you on to artists that you may never have heard of. Here is the wikipedia description:
Last.fm is an Internet radio station and recommendation system that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by an Audioscrobbler plugin installed into its users' music playing application.
Check it out!
