Last.fm

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[edit] What last.fm is, what it allows you to do, how it does it, and what happens when it does it and stuff, with puppies.

Last.fm is a website that tracks the music that stuck-up indie kids listen to on their computers. The sole purpose of the site is for them to show off how "indie" they are by showing all the bands that they listen to that you've never heard of.

It is based on Audioscrobbler, a type of plugin for the media players that will send them details of the music you've listened to. This will then allow you to built detailed charts of what music you've listened to, and let your maw drop in amazement as you discover that you've listened to Rob Hubbard two times this week, Metallica ten times, Mike Oldfield fifteen times and Nobuo Uematsu five thousand, three hundred fifty eight times. (And you don't even like the damn guy's music. How the heck does he do that?) The Last.fm website is thus highly useful as a musical therapy tool. For example, if it indicates you listen to obscure Japanese artists five billion times, it's probably a good time to lay that stuff aside for a while. (A lot of people seem to have this problem with Coldplay and Radiohead. Go figure.)

[edit] Consequences

There are several pitfalls in using Last.fm radio, however. One of the most severe dangers that can leave you scarred for life is the fact that no matter what you listen to, it will, at one point, play HIM. The users have begged Last.fm to fix this bug, or at least try some more humane form of torture (Backstreet Boys and/or Britney Spears), but regrettably Last.fm is understaffed, and just as perplexed as the users. (One likely cause is that since both Last.fm and Audioscrobbler are built in Britain, they're built like effing tanks, and thus impossible to repair without welding gear, sledgehammer and fivety-six different wrenches, or whatever the software engineering equivalent is. These resources are only available to ze Germans, who are still quite puzzled about the thing. Maybe in ten years...)

[edit] The "Light" Switch

In Summer 2006, there was an increasing segment of people who thought collecting music stats and charts and stuff is actually pretty boring. The scientists at Last.fm pondered this quandry for quite a while and came to a solution: They added a light switch to the site, allowing the users to switch the lights on the site on and off. Since the Last.fm site uses the most complex virtual-reality technology ever devised, there is no danger of the bulbs burning out when constantly switched on and off. The light switch feature of the site has thus attracted a lot of fans, and created a veritable subculture in Internet. Nelson Mandela, in one of his deeply moving ponderances, once quoted one blogger who described the various joys of flicking the light switch: "Whee."