RTP-area local music and culture

["Jeremy Blair" <jerblar AT gmail.com>]

MMmmmm, Facebook kool-aid, tastey. I have yet to find the end of the social
networking rabbit hole, let me know if you do...

One stand out feature of Last FM is the music player. It takes note when
bands are consistently grouped together in user generated play lists.  Then,
when someone is listening to the "artist radio" for one of those bands it
will randomly play those bands that are commonly grouped together.

So in theory if a bunch of Lonnie Walker fans built last FM playlists with
Wilco, Deer Tick, Langhorne Slim, and Lonnie Walker and then listened to it
repeatedly, Last FM would calculate Lonnie Walker as a similar artist to the
first three. Then when users all over (the world) listened to the "artist
radio" of one of the first three then Lonnie Walker would show up in the
play list. Wah-lah, free home-grown promotion.

I've only read that this is the way it's supposed to work, I haven't tried
it. I have no idea how many times a lesser known band would have to spin
with a well known one for them to show up in the artist play list...maybe a
lot.

Jeremy

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 1:05 PM, grady <grady AT ibiblio.org> wrote:

> Creating Facebook events is pretty easy to do programmatically, although
> it seems that the default setting is for the event to not show up in
> searches, so you have to manually go change that. Even then I'm not sure
> it's working.
>
> I started fooling around with last.fm when I noticed that flickr
> understood last.fm machine tags, and that last.fm would pull flickr
> photos tagged that way, and match them with events. I'm working on some
> kind of widget that will pull flickr photos from recent local shows
> based on last.fm event tags, so I needed to store last.fm eventIDs in my
> database for that reason.
>
> I can't say that I visit last.fm for any other reason, although in
> theory I can listen to last.fm radio via my Squeezebox, so maybe I'll
> fool around with that once I get bored with Pandora.
>
> I don't think of it as a social networking site so much as just a handy
> aggregator of music-related content.
>
> If there are *other* music-related sites that have APIs available, I'd
> be interested in hearing suggestions from people. The *ideal* site would
> be one where I can code something once and then never touch it again,
> which is emphatically *NOT* the case with Facebook and last.fm. ;-)
>
> Ross
>
> Karen Mann wrote:
> > You're creating facebook pages for all events on your list that don't
> > already have them?? You definitely get the award for going above and
> > beyond the call of duty.
> >
> > As for last.fm, I haven't really looked into it yet, but notice more
> > and more people using it. What does everyone think? Honestly, I'm
> > reluctant to get involved with yet another social networking site, but
> > since I'm on myspace less and less, it might be a good one to try
> > out.
> >
> > On Jan 3, 10:50=A0am, gr... AT ibiblio.org (grady) wrote:
> >> I've been screwing around with Facebook & last.fm integration. At the
> >> moment, if one goes tohttp://www.trianglerock.com, one will see links
> >> to Facebook and last.fm event listings for each show, which might be
> >> handy if you use those services to manage your social life or something.
> >>
> >> In the case of last.fm, it's also kinda cool because they've got a
> >> reciprocal-tagging thing going on with flickr, so *after* an event, you
> >> can tag your photos of that event in flickr with a last.fm tag, and
> >> they'll show up on that show's last.fm event page.
> >>
> >> For those shows that don't already have Facebook or last.fm events
> >> created by venues/bands, I'm creating them, but it's a freaking drag, so
> >> I'd encourage venues/bands to create their own events before I get tired
> >> of doing it.
> -- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
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>