What a social network for music might look like

(Clue - not this)

This wasn't meant to be a post about Ping, Apple's pitiful attempt to launch a social platform around the huge wealth of listening data that iTunes holds on 160m people around the world. The less said about Ping the better really - i'll just point out that of the recommended artists to follow in the screengrab above, I have listened to none of them (ever). And that I last shared music recommendations with other people an hour ago, but Ping can import my social graph from none of the four networks I already use to do that (all of which have open APIs)

No, Apple sort of hijacked something much more important. It was meant to celebrate the fact that I've been using LastFM for a year (i mean using properly, rather than just having an account). And in the last year that really has been something that has meant a lot to me. Not the service itself..... well, actually partly the service itself, because being a massive geek I do get excited about being able to chart lots of different parameters of my music listening. (I swear I've never made a spreadsheet from LastFM data though, honest). No, what is more important is using that data to power the best curation and discovery engine imaginable for 'music i might like' - other people who like the same stuff.

So as it's been a year I did look at an 'end of year chart' type of thing, mainly to find out how many of the albums I'd listened to most I had discovered on LastFM. Of the top 25 albums I've listened to most over the last year, 12 of them were by artists I had never heard until they cropped up in my Neighbourhood or Recommended radio. I think that's pretty awesomeThe one thing you can't use it for is to play all this stuff to other people. I've made a playlist on Spotify with my most played tune off each album, which you can find here if you are interested. If you don't know whether you are interested then just look here to see how similar your musical tastes are to mine