music - how to find similar artists on the net

August 27, 2007

I, for one, am a self-confessed music junkie. Something keeps playing almost every time I am home. There are times when i keep playing the same song again and again till I get tired of it especially when its a song that I’ve recently started taking a liking to. If you are able to relate to what I am trying to say, wouldn’t it good if you had a way of finding new songs based on the artists that you like?

Earlier, if I knew only one song of a group, I would have a look at their wikipedia entry and find out their hit singles and listen to them. This works very well as long as you know the artist name. How do you find out if you do not know which artist is similar to the ones you like? Fortunately, there is one service called Last.fm which allows you to do this and more.

You can search for any song you like and play an audio clip of it there. Similar artists are also listed in the same page. Click on any one of them to go the artist’s profile page and 4 of their tops songs will be listed, followed by their Top Tracks in the last one week and 6 months. Have a look at their 6 months entries and you’ll get an idea of their top songs. You can also play them right there.

If you are a registered user, you get to download a plugin which integrates with winamp or windows media player and you can then enable a process called scrobbling. This means that when you listen to a song, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile. Yeah yeah , I know what you are thinking. Stop being paranoid.

You will know what artists you listen to most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see. My profile page is available here.
Shriram’s profile

I have just started scrobbling and what you see here would only be a subset of what songs I listen to.

Do give it a try and if you find it as useful as I found it or even if you didn’t like it for some reason, shout out in the comments.

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Category Posted in Music