last.fm: worth the hassle?

[yesno]

So, I've been using last.fm for 8 months or so.

http://www.last.fm/user/bergmayer

I'm thinking of trashing it because it encourages me to worry more about keeping track of music than about enjoying it; because it often gives me hassles with syncing from mobile devices (I have do do a hyper-hacky thing to even sync up with my hutPhone); because it crashes and seems to sometimes randomly change around information like "total tracks played"; and because of my hyper-OCD nature I spend way too much time worrying about the accuracy and completeness of its data than is healthy.

I am kind of person who, once set up with something like this, will hesitate before listening to the radio because doing so will make my music listening history on last.fm inaccurate.  When I was a kid I would throw away dubbed tapes friends made me if a song was cut off the end.  I can't help it.

It's fun to follow what *other* people are listening to, but that doesn't mean I have to mess with the thing myself.  The recommendations it gives me are not very good.  Just obvious next steps from what I already like, when I prefer to be challenged with new sounds.

It's kind of cool to see charts of my most listened to stuff, but it seems like an iTunes plugin could handle that.

So, do any of you fellow last.fm-ers find that it is actually useful?  It seems like it could be cool if you are the kind of person who just installs a scrobbler on one computer and doesn't worry about having super-accurate information.

[noise.light]

I was using it and enjoyed seeing the music that my friends were currently enjoying.  But I did start to get a little overly concerned with having certain bands represented.  Which is nonsense that I didn't really want to be bothered with.

Also, I have a cellphone that utilized iTunes and I noticed that Last.FM was making my iTunes crash frequently whenever I had my phone connected.  Once I deleted the software I stopped having problems.

Kinda lame.  Too bad.

[joanna]

i had it installed on my old computer and when that computer died, i let my last.fm account die with it. like you, i felt like it was making me too self-aware about what i was listening to. if i feel like playing nothing but bonny prince billy all weekend, i will do so, sir! that is my business! don't judge!

[Gilly]

I don't look at it much, but I wish I would have started using it a long time ago and that it could magically track cd's and lps. My main purpose is to have a log of everything I've listened to which will be fun to look back on but since I don't listen to music on my computer it won't ever be a true representation. But, I still think it's worthwhile. Right now, I basically just use it to look at what my groups are listening to and let the software do its thing. The recommendations are pretty worthless if you are a musichead.

[yesno]

One other issue I have with it is that it is biased towards bands with short songs.  The Minutemen will tend to be near the top of your list if you listen to them, since you listen to more Minutemen songs per album.  They're not a bad band, but the same thing happens to junky hardcore/grindcore bands.

There are also people who just seem to like gaming the system; i.e., people who just have computers listening to the Beatles on a loop.  Pretty lame.

I think I will delete my account because I can always re-import my iTunes data if it becomes less of a hassle in the future

[AllisonLeGnome]

I've had it for years- I like it. But I don't sync my iPod and I barely ever listen to music on the computer (I have 2128 tracks played since March of 2005), so there's not a lot involved. I do use the recently played tracks as a message board signature a lot.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

Yeah, I sometimes find it useful when I'm away from my external music drive, but the constant self-consciousness about my musical tastes (oh no, there's a U2 or Grateful Dead song coming up on the shuffle! etc) got wearying pretty quickly.  I did have to let go of my music OCD for the month of July, and be OK with the fact that the last 10 or so songs I listened to will sit on my Facebook page for a while, until I update my iPod in like August.

I actually think it's kind of insane that I even considered bringing my music drive with me up here - I can listen to WFMU on the internets just fine, and I have an 80gb iPod and a set of cheap but decent computer speakers with me, so I'm never lacking for music.  Though a small part of me wishes I could make a mix to play at the bar up here.  The bartender/apprentice (there is a bar on the grounds and it's hard to get anywhere else) has horrible taste in music.

[Son of Dorvid]

Grote - Are you at the Macdowell Colony or something?

[Gilly]

I don't have any hang-ups about my musical taste. I like what I like.

[AllisonLeGnome]

I don't have any hang-ups about my musical taste. I like what I like.

I feel the same way- I don't really care if anything I'm listening to is seen by others. There's always the matter of the various things I don't actually listen to in my iTunes, but I would change the song just because I don't want to hear it anyway even without last.fm.

[yesno]

I don't care if people see what I listen to -- in fact I like that people see what I really listen to, as opposed to what I can remember of what my "favorite" music allegedly is.

I just had to kill my account because it was becoming a timesink and a project in and of itself.  How can it be healthy for me to think twice about listening to the WFMU stream just because those songs won't be "registered"?

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

I think I was trying but failing to express that exact sentiment, yesno - I was actually downloading WFMU shows and listening to them in iTunes so Last.fm would scrobble them, instead of just streaming them, when the latter is infinitely easier.

Dorvid, there's a Wurster-type pun in "MacDowell Colony" somewhere, but I'm too fried to think of it. 

I'm at The O'Neill - I think your teach Karen Z. was up here a coupla years back.  The good: there is a beach here, and the aforementioned bar on the grounds.  The bad: the food is kinda inedible, and there have been jellyfish recently.  The neither good nor bad but a possibly futile attempt at avoiding getting zung in Chinatown: I have a shitload of work to do up here and there are a bunch of events I have to go to, only some of which I want to go to, so it's not exactly vacation.

[moonshake]

I don't think it's fun if you start obsessing over what'll show up on your profile. I just let it do its thing in the background. Their recommendation engine doesn't work so I stopped listening to their radio a long time ago. I mostly use the site to look at what what I was listening to during certain times in the past. I've been using the site for a while so it's kind of fun to be able see how my taste has changed over time.

[jbissell]

I've been a member for 3 years and my attachment to the site definitely comes in spurts.  I was having problems with the iPod syncing so I stopped that and if I feel like going to the trouble I'll make a playlist of whatever I listened to at work/in the car that day and play it while I'm sleeping.  I think the events schedule is pretty handy; there have been several times I've found out people I know were going to the same show and I might not have known otherwise.  I also like the rolling charts because my iTunes has gotten all messed up several times over the years so it's nice to have a record of how my tastes have changed over the last couple of years.  The recommendations have never done much for me, it's usually some terrible band trying to promote themselves.

I'd say it's probably worth keeping, you can always turn the scrobbling off if it bothers you that much.