Last.fm and BBC Radio
Posted by Chris @ 9:34 pm
A few weeks ago I blogged about last.fm, a social music service that is pretty cool. Anyway, at the time I said to a few people it would be cool if you could tell last.fm when you'd been listening to a radio station (between two times for example) and have your profile updated as listening to the songs played during that time. Well, that's not quite what I've discovered, but it is still pretty cool!
It turns out that Matt Biddulph, who I admire for his great ideas involving mashups, meta data and the like, who used to work for the BBC, had access to feeds from the BBC's new hard drive radio playlist technology. From this he knocked together a service to ping last.fm when a song was played. (He explains it better!)
What this essentially means is that there is a user profile on last.fm detailing the top songs, most recent tracks etc played by that radio station, and more importantly opens up neighbour radio for these profiles - so you can listen to the music similar to that played on that radio station randomly without DJs or breaks. Matt first did this for BBC 6 Music, but as doctorvee pointed out, he's created user accounts for Radio1, Radio2 and 1Xtra too.
So what does this all mean? Great music without much dross (hopefully), from stations to suit almost everyone, played randomly with no annoying DJs or breaks! Magnificent, and of course there are still the fantastic range of other artists radio and tag radio if you get bored of the BBC's neighbour offerings.
If you don't get the significance, or any part, of this blog post then do ask questions and I'll do my best to answer, I have a tendency to ramble and not make a very good point! Happy listening!
1 Comments
Wednesday, May 31, 2006 9:08:00 am
On a side note, have you heard Nelly Furtado's latest offering, Maneater? It really is rather good, and the best track I think she has ever done, really catchy - listen to it!This comment posted by Chris
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