Audioscrobbler

Audioscrobbler is an Internet-based personal profiling system that uses a plugin installed into its users' music playing application. Working in tandem with Audioscrobbler servers, the system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customisable profile webpage.

As well as generating many often-interesting bar charts based on the harvest of statistics, the service is used to automatically recommend new artists for the user (to introduce them to new music) and to create charts showing various artists' most popular songs and "top fans".

Contents

1 How Audioscrobbler works 2 Audioscrobbler as a global chart 3 Miscellaneous 4 External links

How Audioscrobbler works

The system works by allowing users to register (free) and download a plugin for their music player. The plugin will automatically submit the artist and title of the song after either half the song or the first 240 seconds has played, whichever comes first. When seek controls are used, the track is shorter than 30 seconds, or the track is not properly tagged, the track is not submitted. When submitted to the site, it is inserted into the Recently Played list near the top of the user's page to be viewed by others and, more importantly, into a log of all the songs that user has submitted in order to calculate recommendations and personal charts. Recommendations are calculated using a collaborative filtering algorithm; the tastes of users with similar profiles are relayed to each other.

Users can also participate in the moderation system, to help to clean up the Audioscrobbler database. The artist moderation system links common variants of the spelling of an artist ("Beatles" and "The Beatles", for example) so they count as one artist. This increases that accuracy of the Audioscrobbler charts. Perhaps the most-used community feature within Audioscrobbler is the formation of user groups between users with something in common (for example, membership of another internet forum). Audioscrobbler will generate a group profile similar to the users' profiles, showing an amalgamated set of data and charting the group's overall tastes.

Audioscrobbler as a global chart

As a mass music ranking system, Audioscrobbler (through its overall "total played" table) has several advantages over traditional music charts. While traditional music charts measure a song's success by the number of units sold and radio plays, Audioscrobbler measures it by the number of people playing the song.

There are, however, disadvantages to the use of Audioscrobbler's overall charts as a definitive ranking:

• Relative to the listening populace, few people have an Audioscrobbler plugin installed, and so the charts cannot as yet be considered statistically representative.
  • Correlating to the above, because only registered users' tastes are profiled and added to charts, Audioscrobbler is measuring a restricted demographic: almost all Audioscrobbler users have an Internet connection, take a strong interest in digital music, are likely to be more computer-literate than average, and have wide collections of music to choose from. This means that Audioscrobbler is taking its statistics from a selected, rather than merely reduced, group of users.
  • From a commercial standpoint as well, Audioscrobbler is not as effective a way of introducing the public to new music as the current weekly sales-based charts, fostering stagnation of personal tastes and the aforementioned difficulty for new artists to be recognised.
• Perhaps more importantly, Audioscrobbler tends to foster an inherent bias toward established artists (with new ones often finding themselves unable to attain the dizzying numbers of played tracks required for high rank): not necessarily a grievous issue, though it does make the process of determining the "Best Artist" of the moment rather sluggish and somewhat retrospective.
• The worst flaw, in what is otherwise a very effective method of ranking musicians, is that more prolific artists of average quality will almost always win out over those who have released a few outstanding songs but little else.

Miscellaneous

Audioscrobbler has also fostered a sister site Last.FM, a dynamic internet radio station which uses the Audioscrobbler database to personalise the playlist for each unique user profile.

Plugins currently exist for the following applications:

• AmaroK (integrated support)
• AmigaAMP
• Beep Media Player
• foobar2000
• iTunes
• J. River Media Center
• MPD
• Muine (unofficial plugin)
• Noatun
• Quintessential Player/QCD
• Quod Libet (http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet)
• Rhythmbox
• Winamp
• Windows Media Player
• Xbox Media Center
• XMMS

There are also plugins for the following hardware:

• SlimServer

All Audioscrobbler plugins are open source, and the listening data it collects is released every so often under a Creative Commons License.

External links

• Example of an Audioscrobbler profile (http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/RJ)
• Example of an Audioscrobbler usergroup (http://www.audioscrobbler.com/group/Audioscrobbler)
• Wikipedia usergroup (http://www.audioscrobbler.com/group/wikipedia)
• Official homepage (http://www.audioscrobbler.com)
• Last.fm Internet Radio (http://www.last.fm)