I apologise in advance for the musical snobbery, but its something that’s important to me. The music and less so the snobbery.
I’m listening to a new “micro house” album from an mixer called Nek Sanalet. It’s good stuff. After many years of living away from London I feel that I am finally exiting my musical exile and discovering music that moves me and gets me excited.
Munich’s happy-happy disco excuse for club music has not been good to me and I am now in a “making up for lost time” mode when I use last.fm’s service. The problem with dwelling in the “long tail” of music is one coming across many more artists. Well perhaps not more but certainly one’s not hearing the like of names like Tiefschwartz, Kit Clayton and clubs like Tresor on mainstream radio when driving back from skiing in Austria. So this is why I like services like Last.fm. It’s keeping track of and recommending me names that it thinks I will like. Multiple SQL queries make up for my leaky memory or a reseller’s bad recommendation. Now I actively look forward turning on the application, either as a standalone application or via my Squeezebox. I like it so much I even bought a subscription and for those that know me, this is a big step.
Apart from just playing me cool songs, the application shows me meta data about each song, the artists biography, where they will next be performing/djing etc. It’s the background to the artist that I have found interesting. The average biograpy for each artist reads something like: “Grew up in Bonn, moved to Berlin and now runs record label xyz. Part of the Berlin abc movement. I promise I haven’t put in any play music tagged with "Berlin”, and find this correlation interesting. Ken thinks its a sign and I’m planning a trip there in a couple of weeks to look at some property. Time will tell.
Should Anyone Ask 