Music

Seems like I'm in a bit of an experimental mood. Just signed up for a last.fm account to try to expand my musical horizon as I seem to be listening to the same four albums again and again. I'd read about Pandora before and found the concept of a "music genome project" a fascinating one. If it works right you should be able to submit artists you like and the service will make new recommendations based on your selections.

Due to stupid licensing issues we can't use Pandora here in Australia, or anywhere else outside the US it seems. Thankfully last.fm seems to be free of this rubbish. Played around with it a little and uploaded my listening history to my account and resulting recommendations have been promising.

I especially like how you can plug an artist in and have a custom radio station of similar music created just for you. It works pretty well for the more common western artists but I must say that the recommendations I received for "Hitomi Yaida" weren't all that impressive. Seemed like they just chucked in every J-Pop band they could think of in there. Symptom of a limited Japanese music library perhaps.

Even so I've gotten quite a few new names to look up (excuse my teenage girl like taste in music)

• Sarah Blasko
• Rachael Yamagata
• Aimee Mann
• Charlotte Martin

As with my other recent web 2.0 take up, I've added a little gadget to the Rabbit on the right side so that the Internet can snigger at my song choices in unison. Enjoy.