Confessions of a compulsive scrobbler
Central to the offering of music community last.fm is the idea of scrobbling. Every track is added to an ongoing listening chart, documenting each track and band the user has played.
Some users have played hundreds of thousands of songs and all of it is neatly displayed on their profiles in the form of bar graphs. (My 11,704 listens look feeble in comparison to some of these guys).
Why is sccrobbling important? Because it taps into the stato in all of us. It’s the equivalent of cricket scorers putting dots in boxes or football fans scouring the minutes played column of their fantasy football team. Some of us love stats and when it’s tied to something you’re passionate about like music or sport, it’s the perfect combination. It’s trainspotting for the digital cool kids.
But why stop there?
Music is one thing, but why can’t I have everything in my life (or at least my entertainment life) logged, tagged, graphed and ready for analysis. Although I can do most of this already through other sites, there’s nowhere I can aggregate it all at once. Amazon might know what movies I’ve watched at home through my DVD rentals and there are apps and sites which enable you to log what books you’ve read, programmes you’ve watched and gigs you’ve been to but there’s no one central site to pool all this info.
For us statos to be in heaven, we need it centralised. We also need tasty little graphs to toggle and tweak. We also want it to be complete and reliable. One of the downsides of last.fm is it doesn’t record my plays on portable devices (non-iPhone). But let’s take this further: it should also log my radio listens as well as group listens, when it’s not my machine but I’m still listening (concurrent log-ins can’t be difficult?)
Perversely, the community bit of last.fm is the element I’m not so fussed by. There are other people? I hadn’t noticed; I was too busy seeing how many listens Times New Viking have had in the last 3 months .
(trainspotting pic from Elsie esq on Flickr)
Tags: community, last.fm, mashups, movies, Music, statistics
By Dom Waghorn, Head of User Engagement at 
