Community Music part 1: Foafing-the-Music

I have evangelized about Last.fm for some time now, and am still an avid fan of scrobbling tracks to help refine their music recommendation database. Hence I present to you a several part series on Community Music. There are other programs worth their salt deserving your attention, if you like finding the music you never knew you loved.

FOAF

Foafing-the-Music, created by "Grup de Recerca en Tecnologia Musical, MTG", comprised of a group of over 40 researchers from diverse disciplines at the "Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions i de l’Institut Universitari de l’Audiovisual de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra"

Stated on the site (with a little translation by yours truly) "The group's prime objective is to find the balance between basic and applied investigation and at the same time, to promote an interdisciplinary investigation that incorporates both scientific/technological and humanitarian/artistic origins."

(Imagine that, there is an English link.) "The MTG was created in 1994 by its current director, Dr. Xavier Serra, as one of the research groups of the Audiovisual Institute, a centre for interdisciplinary research in the different areas of Digital Media."

The initiation ritual is the usual. Pick a sign-in name, password, and then add your affiliations (Last.fm, Blogger, Facebook) After a couple days we shall soon see if this foafing thing works out in the next part of the series. The foafers promise to provide links to the following:

- similar artists,
- new music releases from iTunes, Amazon, Yahoo
- album reviews
- mp3 download locations
- podcasts
- automatic playlists
- incoming concerts

all relevant to my taste

However, as I begin to wait for the program to do its magic, I must admit that Last.fm already does all these functions when you take into account user posted dj sets, and concert information.

The Last Music Resource You Will Ever Need

Database technology can work to help us find new music, events, and people. Last.fm is among the most popular new-edge programs that merge Internet radio with music recommendation services. Most of the site is free, but as usual a couple perks come with spending less than $10 a month, mostly intel for the heavy researcher.

A user signs-up by installing an application on their computer that records what music that user is playing. Then, through the process of collaborative filtering, it finds similar users and genres for the user. They call it scrobbling.

Last.fm's 'about us' section couldn't say it better:

Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.

You will meet people based on how their taste relates to your own or to whatever you search for. I tried tripping up the system with the most obscure artists I could think of, but I got several recommendations hitting the bullseye every time.

What Tribe Are You From?

Tribe, like MySpace, is a social networking site. However, it has not (yet) been invaded by kids and spam. The people here seem less concerned with decorating their pages and more with interesting discourse.

The layout is simple and direct. You sign up, look for people with similar taste and let the current take you away. Tribe leaves out the individualization compulsion of putting your posters on walls, choosing your Ipod's color, or picking a matching hat and shoes, while seemingly important, nonetheless a huge time-sink.