Diving into Last FM

So I've started the training process of Last FM's radio and at time of writing I'm just over a month into the process with around 400 artists added to my library and around 2000 tracks played. And I've still got an awful lot more artists to add. Unfortunately, as I stated in my extremely long post on the blog relaunch, the radio player has got a number of issues with someone like me.

Last FM appears to be set up for the addicted teen rather than the long time music lover. What this basically means is that as soon as you "love" one track the system seems intent on playing it over and over and over again and not offering you anything else by that artist. Likewise it's very keen on playing the same artist a lot and ignoring others in your library if left to its own devices. As a result, someone like me who listens to a huge range of artists stretching back over around a 60 year period (that's something like 20 years older than me if you were wondering) is faced with a lot of work to get it to play artists in the first place and to "tune it" to play a much wider variety of tracks whilst still keeping some idea of the artists and tracks that are genuine favourites. If you have a narrow genre of music and/or a narrow range of artists you listen to, there's a good chance it would work well on its own, but the wider your tastes, the more annoying things can get.

It could be argued that a lot of the problem might go away were I to download the scrobbler and use that for the training process, but as I've stated before the one thing I don't want is to have to download additional software to listen to music.

There are also some more general problems though. As well as the obvious one that it appears not all the artists I listen to have music on the site, there's also the problem that artists with the same name share the same page. And it seems there's no easy way to get the artist you want and get rid of tracks from the artists of the same name that you might not. Seems you have to wait for a track to appear on the player and then ban it. Which unfortunately also seems to make that artist less likely to play in general, hence upsetting the training process. Argh!

Even more.... interesting... are some of the really weird tracks you can come across. Usually because the track being played does not necessarily match up with the album it claims to be from, or because it's the right track but not the claimed artist. As just a few examples, Robbie Williams well-known track "Angels" has been replaced with a pan pipes instrumental version of the same, the Flanders and Swann classic "The Hippopotamus Song" is being sung by some opera singer I don't recognise rather than the duo themselves and if you're not a fan of Howard Jones, then the version of "Things Can Only Get Better" being played will come as a bit of a culture shock, as it comes from his 25th Anniversary concert rather than the 80s version you probably remember and that it's claiming to be.

I've started the training process with a combination of artists I tend to listen to on a regular basis and am working back pretty much chronologically from present day on top of that, letting it pick up some artists naturally from other key ones on the way. As a result it's actually got quite good already at understanding what I listen to from Finland and I've picked up on some artists I haven't listened to much before (or even at all) as a result.

Apart from that, most of my other discoveries to date have come about as a result of me dipping into particular artist radios to force artists to play as part of the training process. So without further ado, it's time to introduce you to what I think are some of the best discoveries I've made through this site to date.

Northern Kings
I think Sellaband must have distracted me too much from the Finnish artist discovery I was going through when I first found it, as I really ought to have picked up on this artist before now. Not exactly an artist in their own right, this is a supergroup formed of 4 lead singers from some very well known metal bands in Finland. And interestingly I listen to all except one of those bands on a regular basis, so this now gives me more incentive to go check out the "missing" one too. Even more interestingly, they play no original music but only metal covers of well known songs. So if you ever wondered what the metal version of Lionel Richie's "Hello" sounds like, or "My Way" (as popularised by Frank Sinatra), or even Kylie Minogue's "I Should Be So Lucky", then this is a great place to stop off. Some of the covers can best be described as strange, and this is definitely one of those cases where you'll either love or hate what you hear. My personal favourite so far is their cover of ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down", but you'll easily find most of the large selection of covers they've done on Youtube.

The Giant Leap
Not an easy artist to find information on, as their website lacks a lot of the interactivity of a modern artist site and only contains snippets rather than full blown songs. What I can tell you at the moment is that they play fairly mainstream, listenable rock, but to find much over and above their biography and discography it looks like I'm going to need to go on an internet hunt. To be brutally honest Last FM is as good, if not better, than their own website for information and that has to be a bad thing. You'd be expecting Last FM to be driving traffic to their website for further information, yet there's pretty much nothing extra over there to be had.

Dark Moor
For those who like their male fronted heavy/symphonic metal along the lines of artists like Stratovarius, Hammerfall, Helloween etc. then this artist from Spain should be right up your street. You'll find a lot of live videos on their website, but sadly it seems you'll need to go elsewhere (e.g. Last FM) if you want to hear recorded versions of tracks.

Fox Amoore
If you like instrumental soundtracks, orchestral or new age music then this appears to be a hidden indie gem. Both restful and interesting at the same time, this is an excellent choice if you want some background music to listen to while you work. There are quite a few tracks to be discovered and it's well worth stopping off at both his Youtube profile and his Myspace page to get an even better idea of what he's created to date. He's also already written some game soundtracks as well as covers of some others.

Ikodo Moonstrife
At first glance it might be easy to dismiss this one as a hobbyist, given they've never actually performed for anyone else, but with a recorded quality higher than many indie artists out there, this is well worth a listen for the more professional sound alone. Once again an instrumental artist, only this time in the electronic/trance fields, I actually think there's some good material here and I'd be interested to see if they ever try to make it out of the hobby stage as a result.

Misha Williams
Here's one for those of you who like the ladies. This young singer-songwriter has already supported more well-known names such as "Girls Aloud" with her similar blend of up-tempo catchy pop/rock tunes. Given her age, this could well be an artist to watch for the future.

The Ditty Bops
A little hard to describe this duo of ladies, other than the fact they seem to write folk tunes which are heavily influenced by music hall themes of the 1920s onwards. The results are surprisingly catchy and extremely interesting lyrically. Well worth checking out if you want to listen to something that little bit different.

As to what's next on the Last FM front, I'm still expecting the training process to take until at least Christmas at the rate I'm going, so expect quite a few changes in artist order, particularly away from the first page or two as well as a lot of new additions if you do stop by before then. I might find a few more new artists during the training to tell you about later, but I'm not really expecting to at this point, because I'm still taking a mostly hands-on approach rather than letting it play whatever it wants.

So before I go for now, here's one final interesting little aside I found out from the age-gender chart in the experimental area of Last FM. To give you a brief description, for any artist, the average age of their listeners is calculated along with the ratio of males to females within that number and this value can then be plotted on a chart of age vs. gender. If given a Last FM user id, the software then takes the most popular artists from that user's profile (currently can select up to 90 artists) and calculates a point on the chart to represent the user. And I've found my own chart very interesting reading indeed.

Age wise it reckons I correspond to (approx) a 25yr old for musical taste, and I'm also fairly gender neutral when it comes to my artist choices i.e. I listen to artists males mostly listen to about as much as artists females mostly listen to. Both these things are pretty much what I was expecting to find, but the interesting part then comes when my top artists are added into the chart. You see, whilst it seems I listen to artists that males of pretty much any average age listen to, when it comes to artists that females mostly listen to, it seems I'm stuck firmly with the teenage market as there's virtually nothing in the female section of the chart above about an average age of 25, even when I expand it to the maximum number of artists the chart currently covers. The few artists I do have on the female side of the divide up there are generally all pretty close to the gender neutral line. Whether this means there aren't that many older female users of Last FM or whether there are but I just don't share any of their tastes in music is something I'm still trying to work out. Have I really been working with males too long and hence picked up more on their music tastes as a result? What does the average 25+ female listen to musically anyway? Any suggestions are more than welcome.