A little late to the game, I have finally integrated myself with Audioscrobbler. The site builds a profile of the music you listen to (provided by free plugins for almost every player out there, iTunes for me). And it now allows me to provide a list of the music I am listening to right now in my "listening to..." block on the right. Not like anyone gives a crap what I listen to.

The site provides your own page which displays stats about your music as well as making recommendations and links you with other people who have similar tastes. I know it sounds like a musical Friendster, and it is sorta, but it's not trying too hard, just providing the information. And the data collected is available via a Creative Commons license: Non-commercial, Share-alike, Attribution. I looked at the data, it's generic with no personal info at all for the privacy paranoid. In fact, it's a little boring, but then, I downloaded it and looked it over so maybe I'm boring.

They provide a set of webservice friendly feeds so users can syndicate their recently played music on their blogs (like I have done on the homepage of this site).

The site also ties into Last.FM which takes the whole thing one step further providing a custom streaming radio station for music that you like as well suggested music based on the things you currently listen to. Very cool. This is where this whole thing should go.

The basic attitude of the two projects is free and open. But with that comes a bit of a non-financial price. Both sites and services have been having their share of problems recently with outages, server overloads, and other random glitches. No complaints though, it's a free service, you get what you want out of it.

Check out my Audioscrobble user page.