Why scrobbling

All interviews are edited for length and clarity. Richard Jones, inventor of Audioscrobbler : I had been reading about collaborative filtering algorithms, and it occurred to me it would be fun to try and use them to discover new music. There wasn't really a suitable source of music data to base recommendations on, though. I considered crawling the P2P systems of the time Soulseek was popular back then -- but in , when the world was still reeling from Napster melting down, people who listened to MP3s tended to hoard massive collections of music they had no intention of listening to, just because they could.

This made the list of music you were sharing via P2P a poor data set to base recommendations on -- yes, I downloaded the full Metallica back catalog just because I could, but I didn't really listen to all of it, and I wouldn't want recommendations based on it. Always-on internet was rapidly becoming the norm, and more and more people were listening to MP3s on their computers with software such as Winamp. So scrobbling was born: I wrote a plug-in for Winamp that reported what was being played in realtime -- the perfect data source for recommending and discovering music.

Early versions of the Audioscrobbler website did little more than present all the data and cross-link everything. You could click an artist name from your profile page, see which tracks by that artist were most popular, click on one of the 'top listeners' of that artist, and end up looking at someone else's music profile who listened to the same artist as you -- then start the process again, clicking on a different artist.

That mechanic was core to the whole experience, and still is today. I had no idea that would be such a fun and interesting thing to explore until I'd built it. I remember thinking I had discovered something pretty cool at that point. That was the "Audioscrobbler minimum viable product. The next occasion I remember was when I spent some time digging in the logs and running the numbers, a few months after I started.

The handful of friends I had initially convinced to install my Winamp plugin "so I can collect enough data for my dissertation" had told all their friends, and before long, I was seeing new people signing up every day from all over the world. People were starting to write about Audioscrobbler in early waxy. The surge in interest and signups was highly motivating. As silly as it sounds, the other occasion that stands out for me is a bit later on, when we got our first Google Adsense payment in the mail.

We were struggling to afford rent, servers, etc. The first month we ran ads on the website, we made a few thousand pounds. I think that was when it first dawned on me that what we were doing could turn out to be a viable business, as well as a labor of love. Jones : I'm not sure "acquired" is the right way to look at it. We teamed up and pooled our resources. There were many similarities in the long-term plans for both projects, the first meeting went really well, so we decided to merge the two projects.

I'm not the first person to notice this, Laura has a great editorial on how we self-edit thanks to Facebook and scrobbles. One of the things Laura draws parallels with is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. It's a prison designed to allow guards to monitor the activity of all the prisoners from a central vantage point, but with no clear knowledge on the prisoner's part of when exactly he's being watched. Jeremy Bentham called it "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.

I have no idea when somebody might look at my scrobbles, but the very fact that they might changes my behavior. So, does it change me? Maybe, maybe not. The story above about the party is purely theoretical. I never got invited to those sorts of parties. But here's a true one:. One afternoon, my mom had to go shopping.

I was on the computer, as usual, and she merely asked me to keep an eye on my brother, and take a break from the screen to jump on the trampoline with him at some point. Well, I didn't jump on the trampoline with him. I never even broke eye contact with my PowerMac , in fact. When my mom returned, she asked me if I'd jumped on the trampoline. I told her I had. A few minutes later she noticed that there was junk all over the trampoline ye olde recreational equipment scrobble.

I broke down and confessed. I felt horrible, not only because I lied to my mom, but I missed a perfect opportunity to hang out with my brother and play around on the trampoline. Now, I don't remember at all what I was doing on my Mac, it was truly inconsequential and never scrobbled. But my feelings of deceit and a missed opportunity have helped form me into the person I am now. Not every scrobble is this important in the grand scheme of things, but I do see a form of self-editing in how I act.

I might not listen to an album I'm interested in because I'll know it's going to show up on my scrobble, or maybe listen to an album I'm not enjoying extra hard just to troll or impress my Rdio friends. If I'm really conscious about it, I'll just turn off the scrobble broadcast, and do what I want. But I don't always remember to be conscious. Everything I ever watch on Netflix, or purchase on Audible, has been recorded for all time.

How has this impacted what I watch or listen to? It's hard to know, because it's so subconscious at this point. I don't think these things end up fundamentally changing what I truly like, that's more visceral and inherent in who I am, but I do think it keeps me from knowing what I truly like, at least in some small, more subtle way.

Maybe I just like that one hook on that one Lady Gaga song, even if I verify that I dislike her album and overall image or message. If I always act like somebody is watching, will I ever learn how I'd act if nobody was? Who knows, maybe Starfucker is really great.

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Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Mark Harris. Mark Harris is a former writer for Lifewire who wrote about the digital music scene and streaming music services in an easy to understand, no-nonsense manner. Updated on September 30, Tweet Share Email. In This Article. What is Scrobbling? Streaming Services. Software Media Players. Hardware Devices.

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