Spitball Army

At last!!  Last.fm, that is.

Last.fm is a UK-based website that compiles information on music-listening habits, massages that data, and shares the information with an active user base of over 20 million people, making recommendations in a manner similar to Amazon’s system.  Wikipedia has a very extensive description of the history and development of the Last.fm website, loaded with much more information than I would ever attempt to lay out here.  I have been a member of Last.fm in one form or another for the last two months.

Lately, I’d been looking for a sidebar widget that would allow the readers of my blog to randomly listen to the audio clips featured on various posts throughout Spitballarmy.com.  Then I found the Last.fm radio player, which fits right onto this weblog’s sidebar with ease (it’s near the bottom, on the left side of the page).

Last.fm takes stock of all of the tracks that I listen to on my personal computers and both of my iPods.  It calculates lists of the most popular songs (that I listen to), the most popular artists (that I listen to), and also prepares a randomly-selected radio playlist drawn from 30,000+ of my files that you can listen to whenever you want.  All you need to do is click the PLAY button on the Last.fm sidebar widget, and have SpitballArmy Radio streaming from your computer whenever you wish.  There is even an option on the widget that allows you to load the radio into a pop-up window, so that you don’t have to keep your browser page open to the blog.

The first few hours of my listening experience with SpitballArmy Radio has blurred genres very freely.  I haven’t heard any classical music yet, but there has been a healthy smattering of jazz (in fact, Miles Davis’ version of “Summertime” just queued up).  I hope you’ll check it out, and perhaps it will become a dangerous and addictive habit.  You may even be encouraged to start your own radio station and post it on your website….If you do, please let me know by dropping in a comment.

Speaking of comments, please feel free to muse liberally on this topic.  I think this is an intriguing facet of the new music industry (you’ll notice links to purchase mp3 files on the widget and pop-up radio).  It seems that the programming quality of terrestrial radio has pretty much hit rock bottom, and the most interesting music to be discovered through listening is on the internet (outside of live venues, of course).  What could be better than an internet radio station network created by a community of music-loving friends?