I wouldn't normally reproduce an entire post from the our Double Shot blog, but a. I feel pretty strongly about this and b. it feels relevant to both blogs. So here you go.
What's going on?!
I've been a Last.fm user for five years or so now; I can't call myself an especially early adopter any more with it than anything else, but with nearly 90,000 scrobbles and counting I'd certainly claim to be a heavy user. More to the point I've been an especially vocal fan - a proselytizer, I guess. In workshop after workshop, panel discussion after presentation I've held Last up to be a paragon of algorithm-driven, stats-based personalisation. I've patiently explained why they trump, say, Pandora, with the latter's recommendations ultimately driven by essentially editorial decisions.
I've illustrated my enthusiasm with a pretty straightforward look at some of my own personal tastes. I like metal. So that's Iron Maiden or Judas Priest, right? Well, no, I'd rather chew my own face off than listen to a whole album by either of them (although I should point out my personal, ie. non-musical admiration for both Halford and Dickinson, but won't go into that now... ) Similarly, I'd say I love classical music... but that two thirds of the standard nineteenth century repertoire leave me cold at best - a retching at worst.
Now the old ways of making recommendation very often run on genre, so an assumption that I might want to listen to 'Hell Bent for Leather' or Turandot based on a very basic understanding of my generic tastes wouldn't be unreasonable. But it would, to repeat myself, be wrong.
The power of Last.fm has been that no-one's making any decisions about genre, or about mood or really about anything. There's just an awful lot of computation drawing an awful amount of inference from an awfully large amount of information.
Which is what I've been more than happy (if always a little trepidatous) to get Last up in front of an audience at, say, a workshop, and see what its Recommendations Radio service would bung my way. I have an especially fond memory of doing this at Music Learning Live! at the Sage in Gateshead last year. I'd already primed the audience by pillorying my own tastes: extreme metal, dodgy prog, navel-gazing 20th century classical and wiffly psych jazz. What does Last go and play me? In quick succession, if memory serves: Van Der Graaf Generator, Mompou, something from Miles' Big Fun and Mastodon. Priceless.
So what the fuck has happened to it lately? Over the last few weeks I've noticed - well, hardly "noticed", rather been appalled by - a massive deterioration in service, with recommendations further and further "off".
Now I can see how some things happen. Partly it's down to my machine being left scrobbling when others use it. My oldest son is Joe is a curiously diehard 70s soul fan; it's down to him that Stevie Wonder is in my most listened-to artists (and, of course, I have no problem with this). Joe's younger brother Franck, on the other hand listens to a shitload of undergound hip hop, d'n'b and dubstep. Meanwhile, I spent quite a bit of time over Christmas prepp'ing a NYE playlist which, the average age of attendees at said party being, er, early-40s, was pretty heavily early 80s: ZTT, post-punk, electro, and, yes, New Romantic.
So I would expect some weirdness in Last's recent recommendations, a bit too much hip hop say, or the odd but of 80s naffery. But the number of misses has been off the scale. Really. And there's other oddness as well. Why do I keep getting the exact same Pete Rock track? Why is every third track (at least!) Björk-related (a solo piece, or something by KUKL or the Sugarcubes), why so much Brazilian MPB (yes, yes, I love bossa and tropicalia - so play me some of that).
Now I am not for one minute suggesting this is the case, but were I a cynic I'd have say that the brutal truth of the CBS takeover had finally trickled down, that promotionally-driven choices were being made for me, that algorithms were being tweaked to allow certain material to float to the top. Like I say, I genuinely don't believe this is the case... but something is very seriously wrong. And I certainly won't be using it in a live presentation any time soon.
It's funny, about this time last year I was pretty dismissive of Idiomag. To their credit they responded intelligently, and although it's taken a while, their recommendations have gone from strength to strength in terms of relevance. This morning brought news of Sonic Youth working on a new album, D'Angelo collaborating with Prince and Lamb of God up to something or other. I'm not an especially big LoG fan, but nonetheless that's pretty good going.
So it feels a strange moment to be getting pissy about Last, the poster child of the collab.filt recommendations age. But I leave you with this: I needed to hear Judas Priest's 'Breaking the Law' precisely never again in my life. Something, apparently, unrealised by the Last maths.
I can't tell you how much I hope this some temporary algorithmic weirdness; I want my Last back!
