My Pet Homunculus

Given how we all used to access music even 15 years ago, it’s sort of hard to fathom the fact that we now have almost instant access to any music we want, at any time we want. The recording industry has been losing its collective mind trying to get a grasp on all the technological developments that deliver unto us the tunes… Are you an iTunes downloader or an evil torrenter? Do you use YouTube for instant listening satisfaction or are you into new services like Grooveshark and SoundCloud? And the big one: Where/how in god’s name will you get introduced to your new favourite earworm?

Big factor here: a lot of this depends on what kind of a music consumer you are. Radio people, your passivity means you’re eternally at the whim of chance and the industry — but at least you can get Sirius and maybe check out Pandora if you’re feeling wacky. For active listeners, you’re obviously trying to take control of the situation. Often obsessively.

So, let’s talk about the benefits of tracking our music.

Last.fm has been around for ages. It’s simple enough, really: install their software, listen to your music normally, and it does this automagical thing called ‘scrobbling’ (worst verb ever) in the background. Then on your profile page, you get all sorts of personal listening stats, suggestions for related music you might like, and radio stations that let you discover new and relevant music. Cool. With Last.fm, though, it’s the not-so-obvious benefits that really bump the service up to kick-ass levels. These guys have been tracking community music activity since 2002, and now claim a user base of 30 million — that’s a lot of fine-tuning. With such a broad user base, the radio function has grown in scope as well, and now offers stations based on artists or keywords of your choice, your musical ‘neigborhood’ (comprised of users with similar tastes to yours), and even your own library. Last.fm also has one of the best gig tracking and planning applications in existence integrated into the service. But — and this is a BIG ‘but’ — you can only track listens on your local media player and some MP3 devices (and, if you’re curious enough to dig around for a while on the site, you can activate Hype Machine scrobbling). That’s not exactly comprehensive in terms of current listening platforms.

So you can imagine my enthusiasm when I read about Twones early last year, seeing as these guys let me track my listens on all sorts of off- and online services as well. 21 possible listening services are currently listed, including iTunes, YouTube, LaLa, iMeem and even Last.fm itself. And pushes out listening info pretty seamlessly to Twitter, if you’re into that sort of thing. Hot damn! Twones tracks all this through the Twones Tracker, which runs in either Internet Explorer (up to version 7 only?!) and Firefox — other browsers are out of luck. Not so hot damn. Seeing as Twones is still in ‘pre-beta’ (and invite-only), the integrated options and community are a little narrow, as you’d expect. Radio is currently limited to popular tracks from across the community, your own previous listens, and what’s currently being listened to by users. The Twones team has promised a blog widget that will display your most recent listens, but it has yet to appear. Despite the fact that it’s still in internet infancy, Twones does some very cool things — for a pretty narrow niche of listeners.

OK, then, which to choose? If you’re going with only one, Last.fm is clearly the more well-rounded, better choice. Unless you routinely DJ house parties with your bookmarked YouTube videos, that is — despite some shortcomings, Twones is perfectly suited to the kind of people who think an actual music collection is a thing of the past.

The obvious outcome here is for Last.fm to buy Twones and absorb its features. You hear me, CBS?