Re: [Air-l] last.fm group
On 28/05/07, Nancy Baym <nbaym@ku.edu> wrote:
For now though, I'm on a quest to scrobble lots of Queens of the Stone Age.
Which leads to the point that many people seem to game the system, either playing lots of things they want to be seen as listening to whether they're listening or not, or making sure scrobbling is off when they listen to things that don't fit the image they want to project.
Nancy
Thanks for the reference. I did once check into the "top players" of particular groups and they seem to be playing those tracks an infeasible number of times. As you say, there's definitely an element of gaming the system going on. Relatedly, I wonder if we'll get a story of "so and so" sacked/disciplined for playing unsuitable music during working hours with their scrobbler record being used as evidence. I think your comment about groups being used as identity badges in social network sites might well be interesting from a folkloristic perspective. I'm used to thinking of groups being crucibles of culture but the relationship between identity, individual and the group seems quite complex in social network sites. For example the playful groups on Facebook ("When this group gets a 1000 members, Tony Blair will dance the Macarena") seem to thrive if they look good on an individual profile. Such groups might, actually, be thought of as artistic expression, as a sort of collaborative joke. The key to this appears to be embedding and badges. Using badges to show membership in groups as an aspect of identity is nothing new but it seems as though embedding has created a new method of doing this via social software and web services. Bruce
Thanks for the reference. I did once check into the "top players" of particular groups and they seem to be playing those tracks an infeasible number of times. As you say, there's definitely an element of gaming the system going on. Relatedly, I wonder if we'll get a story of "so and so" sacked/disciplined for playing unsuitable music during working hours with their scrobbler record being used as evidence.
out of curiosity, what order of magnitude is "an unfeasible number of times" in this case? 10^4+? or somewhere around 10^3? i have a few tracks in my iTunes on campus that have been played a LOT more than is average for that sort of thing - either because I played them on repeat, or in a loop, or something similar. [Soundtracks ripped as single mp3 files are particularly prone to this.... especially if you leave them running overnight by accident.] --e
Thanks for the reference. I did once check into the "top players" of particular groups and they seem to be playing those tracks an infeasible number of times. As you say, there's definitely an element of gaming the system going on. Relatedly, I wonder if we'll get a story of "so and so" sacked/disciplined for playing unsuitable music during working hours with their scrobbler record being used as evidence.
out of curiosity, what order of magnitude is "an unfeasible number of times" in this case? 10^4+? or somewhere around 10^3?
Last.fm has moved away from designating "top fans" based on # of listens and don't report that info anymore (or use the word "fan" which seemed to encourage this kind of gaming). Now they report the week's "top listeners". I assume this is in response to ongoing squabbling over 'cheaters' (last.fm forum terminology, not mine). The discussions of this on the forums is interesting, because some people are really offended by the fact that others do it, while still others find it very hard to understand why it matters. It also leads to all kinds of value judgements about the 'right' way to listen to music and the right to judge how others' listen. To answer the question about what constitutes unfeasible, here's an example: I found it hard to believe that someone's listened to 108,328 REM songs since registering in March 2004. That's about 45 hours/week of REM every week for 3 years. On his profile he writes: "I listen to a lot of music, I don't sleep very much. I've (knock on wood) never lost my stats due to server problems. Therefore, I have a massive playcount. Now quit bothering me about it. Jeez. And yes, I do listen to that much R.E.M., so consider yourself informed." which speaks to the notion that some Last.fm users are policing the system looking for suspected cheaters and calling them to account for what they perceive as unfeasible numbers of listens. Nancy
participants (3)
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Bruce Mason -
elw＠stderr.org -
Nancy Baym