After random and prolonged sessions of feeding my preferences into last.fm, it is finally time to document the recommendations last.fm throws at me. i am maintaining a excel sheet of all the recommendations, including the weekly recommendations of artists.
my first documented session was on March 17. i started off the session by documenting all the artists. then i let last.fm do its thing by letting it 'play my recommendations'.
Observations:
1. songs played are directly related to the artists who are in the recommended list.
2. if a artist is removed from the recommeded list, his songs no longer play as recommendations.
3. the song playlist does NOT deviate from the artist recommendation list
my first session threw up some pretty bad artist and songs. after removing some of these artist from the list, the song list deviated towards some really decent tracks. some of these tracks were infact ones i have heard before and are my all tiem favorites, and some were new tracks which were suprizingly awesome too!!!
but we all know music makers are not a predictable bunch of ppl. no matter how good an artist is, he or she or they always do release some music which might not fit on your scale of 'good' music. I love audioslave, and i love all thier songs, each and everyone of them. but some audioslave tracks are a lil too slow or grungy for me. you can attribute this to the fact that sometimes, listening to a artist perform a particular type of music programs your mind expect a certain tone, pitch and idealogy from that artist. any deviation by the artist from his original music style will put a lot of people off. because at the end of the day, we appreciate music, not the artist's ability in coming up with a totally radical piece of music, especially if you dont like that style of music. i would stop listening to audioslave if they were to get into country music ... for sure i would .. most Definately i would.
i know the statements above sound crude and judgemental, and i do not mean to generalize my views to all the music loving people of planet earth, but i have seen this happen one times too many. metallica, slipknot, ratm, chris connel. some ppl like eminem seem to pull off this transition with ease, going from rapping about issues plaguing our society and its understucture, to singing about money mercedes and fame.
moods. i know i have already documented thiis in one of my earlier posts, but when i started documenting my recommendations, i realized the critical role mood plays in shaping my recommendations. so i decided to document my mood too !!!
going back to my excel sheet, in my first session i ended up banning a lot of stations from my playlist. i also removed a lot of artists from my list. the second session proved to be a little better, with some decent tracks showing up in my list. by the third session i had a pretty good set of artists and songs being churned out from my last.fm radio.
i plan to now wait for a week before starting off another spate of listening sessions. hopefully i can determine some pattern in my tastes.
i will also talk more about pandora and how i believe music recommendation engines work towards satisfying listeners in my next post.
Link to my lat.fm recommendation excel sheet:
http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=76ec86040ae994630f5b549db4481c23
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