Blog

United States 16
Dream Theater, Metallica, System of a Down, Pantera, Symphony X, Tool, Black Label Society, Manowar, Anthrax, Frank Zappa, Iced Earth, Megadeth, Queensrÿche, The Mars Volta, Spock's Beard, Misfits

Finland 9
YUP, Eläkeläiset, Jope Ruonansuu, Amorphis, ...and Oceans, Asa, Kingston Wall, Mokoma, Viikate

United Kingdom 8
Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Porcupine Tree, Venom, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, The Sisters of Mercy, Shpongle

Norway 7
Darkthrone, Ulver, Bathory, Emperor, Dimmu Borgir, Gorgoroth, Burzum

Japan 4
Nobuo Uematsu, Gackt, Yasunori Mitsuda, Konami Kukeiha Club

Sweden 2
Pain of Salvation, Opeth

Germany 2
Sodom, Blind Guardian

Denmark 1
King Diamond

Netherlands 1
Ayreon

I copied this survey from http://www.last.fm/user/kiivie cause I thought it was interesting;

United States 30
Laura Veirs, Aimee Mann, Kill Hannah , Black Lab , The Format, Jimmy Eat World , Jack's Mannequin , Ivy , Rainer Maria , Garbage , Sierra Swan, The Hush Sound, Cartel, Counting Crows, Loquat, The Shins, The Dagons, As Tall as Lions, Third Eye Blind, iiO, Anberlin, Matchbox 20, Deathcab For Cutie, The Killers, The Postal Service, Dashboard Confessional, Jeremy and Julian Soule, Sunny Day Real Estate, Ether Aura

United Kingdom 10
Goldfrapp , Placebo, Aqualung, Ladytron, Keane, Camera Obscura, Dido, Snow Patrol, Coldplay, the legion of doom

Japan 5
Masaharu Iwata, Konami Kukeiha Club, Ryuji Sasai, Yoko Shimomura, Hitoshi Sakimoto

Argentina 1
G-Spliff

Belgium 1
Styrofoam

Denmark 1
Kashmir

Russia 1
Regina Spektor

Canada 1
Avril Lavigne

So , ive finally made it into 5 figures. A few new artists , but most of my old favourites are here still. Anyhow....here is my top 10 artists and top 10 tracks as of 07/03/08.

ARTISTS.....

1. Oasis

2. Eat Static

3. Kasabian

4. S'Express

5. Bomb the Bass

6. Konami

7. Konami Kukeiha Club

8. Noel Gallagher

9. The Chemical Brothers

10. The Prodigy

TOP 10 TRACKS.....

1. Let Forever Be

2. Go Let It Out

3. Merry Xmas Everybody

4. Roll With It

5. Reason Is Treason

6. Heavyweight Champion Of The World

7. Shakermaker

8. Implant (2002 Update)

9. Me Plus One

10. Shakermaker

So there you have it , what d'you think? Feel free to add any comments.....


Rob

Take your top 20 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php


My eclectic score is currently





The 98 related artists for my profile are 1TYM, 2 Unlimited, 2MB, ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, Ace of Base, Air, Art Brut, Asuka Ota & Hajime Wakai, Black Flag, Bloc Party, Bob Dylan, Boozoo Bajou, Culture Beat, DJ Doc, DJ Shadow, DJ Simon, Daft Punk, Danny Elfman, Dead Kennedys, Dr. Alban, Epik High (2), Falcom Sound Team jdk, Genesis, Georges Brassens, Gilbert Bécaud, Haddaway, Howard Shore, Jacques Brel, Jazzanova, Jeff Buckley, Jinusean (2), Joe Dassin, John Williams, KMFDM, Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, Koji Kondo, Kil, Konami Kukeiha Club, LCD Soundsystem, Leonard Cohen, Lexy, Lou Reed, MC Sniper, Marilyn Manson, Maxïmo Park, Mo' Horizons, NAOKI, NOFX, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nick Drake, Nine Inch Nails, Nintendo, ORANGE RANGE, Orgy, Pink Floyd, Queen, Ramones, Rancid, Skinny Puppy, Stephen Fry & Joby Talbot, Super Junior, Terry Scott Taylor, The Beatles, The Chemical Brothers, The Libertines, The Police, The Rakes, The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, Tosca, Tropical Gorilla, U2, UVERworld, Yes, dZihan & Kamien, Daiki Kasho & Alan Brey, ch, Daiki Kasho, Alan Brey, tetsu, dj TAKA, meister, Édith Piaf, 下村陽子, 佐宗綾子, 光吉猛修, 光田康典, 峰岸透, 庄司英徳, 戸高一生, 植松伸夫, 永田権太, 相原隆行, 細江慎治, 若井淑, 백지영, 비, 신화, 이효리, 채연, 태빈

See LET'S COMBINE! for more information on what's this page all about!


Japanese duplicate artists

あ　い　う　え　お
か　き　く　け　こ
さ　し　す　せ　そ
た　ち　つ　て　と
な　に　ぬ　ね　の
は　ひ　ふ　へ　ほ
ま　み　む　め　も
や　　　ゆ　　　よ
ら　り　る　れ　ろ
わ　ゐ　　　ゑ　を
ん


【か】

春日八郎 かすが はちろう

春日 八郎 ; 春日　八郎

加藤いづみ

加藤 いづみ ; Katou Izumi ; Izumi Katou

カルメン・マキ

カルメン マキ ; Carmen Maki

the GazettE ガゼット

ガゼット

【こ】

コナミ矩形波倶楽部

コナミ ; Konami Kukeiha Club

GO!GO!7188 ゴーゴーなないちはちはち

Go ! Go ! 7188 ; ゴー!ゴー! 7188

Link

My results:

1: Akira Yamaoka
2: Mary Elizabeth McGlynn
3: 植松伸夫
4: 光田康典
5: Konami
6: 菅野よう子
7: 下村陽子
8: dredg
9: The Mars Volta
10: Oceansize
11: Tool
12: Deftones
13: A Perfect Circle
14: Porcupine Tree
15: At the Drive-In
16: Coheed and Cambria
17: The Black Mages
18: 松枝賀子 & 江口貴勅
19: 崎元仁
20: 梶浦由記
21: 浜渦正志
22: Fear Factory
23: Machine Head
24: Sepultura
25: Soulfly
26: Static-X
27: Chimaira
28: In Flames
29: Pantera
30: Slayer
31: KoЯn
32: Disturbed
33: Mudvayne
34: Slipknot
35: Drowning Pool
36: Rob Zombie
37: Ill Niño
38: Nine Inch Nails
39: Incubus
40: Team Sleep
41: System of a Down
42: Rage Against the Machine
43: Cypress Hill
44: Dr. Dre
45: Snoop Dogg
46: Beastie Boys
47: Eminem
48: Wu-Tang Clan
49: 2Pac
50: Xzibit
51: Ice Cube
52: Killswitch Engage
53: Trivium
54: Red Hot Chili Peppers
55: Nirvana
56: Audioslave
57: Foo Fighters
58: Metallica
59: Queens of the Stone Age
60: dälek
61: cLOUDDEAD
62: Techno Animal
63: Cannibal Ox
64: El-P
65: Subtle
66: Sole
67: Prefuse 73
68: Antipop Consortium
69: Alice in Chains
70: Lamb of God
71: DevilDriver
72: Hatebreed
73: As I Lay Dying
74: Atreyu
75: Unearth
76: 36 Crazyfists
77: 東野美紀
78: Konami Kukeiha Club
79: 岩垂徳行
80: 伊藤賢治
81: なるけみちこ
82: 桜庭統
83: 菊田裕樹
84: 仲野順也
85: Ajs Nigrutin
86: Bad Copy
87: 43zla
88: Prti Bee Gee
89: Beogradski Sindikat
90: PKS
91: Struka
92: Marcelo
93: Marchelo
94: DJ Shadow
95: RJD2
96: UNKLE
97: Boards of Canada
98: Aphex Twin
99: Massive Attack
100: Amon Tobin
101: DJ Krush
102: Jurassic 5
103: The Roots
104: A Tribe Called Quest
105: Blackalicious
106: De La Soul
107: Mos Def
108: Dilated Peoples
109: Common
110: Talib Kweli
111: Nas
112: Jay-Z
113: Notorious B.I.G.
114: Mobb Deep
115: The Game
116: Ghostface
117: Coal Chamber
118: Mushroomhead
119: Katatonia
120: Opeth
121: Anathema
122: My Dying Bride
123: Amorphis
124: Dark Tranquillity
125: Agalloch
126: Paradise Lost
127: Moonspell

Malo sam razočaran. Svaka čast nekim japanskim skladateljima na vrhu liste, ali oni mi ne mogu nikako biti ispred Static-a, Machine Head ili Rage.

Seen on sraets' journal.

My results are:

1: Deftones
2: Tool
3: A Perfect Circle
4: KoЯn
5: Nine Inch Nails
6: Incubus
7: Team Sleep
8: System of a Down
9: Rage Against the Machine
10: Thievery Corporation
11: Zero 7
12: Massive Attack
13: Air
14: Tosca
15: Kruder & Dorfmeister
16: Morcheeba
17: Nightmares on Wax
18: Portishead
19: Foo Fighters
20: Red Hot Chili Peppers
21: Jimmy Eat World
22: Coldplay
23: Audioslave
24: Weezer
25: Green Day
26: Stuart Chatwood
27: Konami Kukeiha Club
28: Akira Yamaoka
29: 桜庭統
30: 山根ミチル
31: 植松伸夫
32: 岩垂徳行
33: 近藤浩治
34: 下村陽子
35: John Legend
36: Kanye West
37: Common
38: Jay-Z
39: Alicia Keys
40: Justin Timberlake
41: Pharrell
42: Usher
43: Mary J. Blige
44: Darkwood Dub
45: Sofa Surfers
46: Asian Dub Foundation
47: Morphine
48: Laika
49: Gotan Project
50: Tricky
51: Moloko
52: dredg
53: Glassjaw
54: The Mars Volta
55: At the Drive-In
56: Del tha Funkee Homosapien
57: Deltron 3030
58: Hieroglyphics
59: MF DOOM
60: Aesop Rock
61: A Tribe Called Quest
62: Handsome Boy Modeling School
63: Blackalicious
64: Wu-Tang Clan
65: Godsmack
66: Disturbed
67: Drowning Pool
68: Mudvayne
69: Static-X
70: Slipknot
71: Staind
72: Metallica
73: Bunny Wailer
74: Burning Spear
75: Dennis Brown
76: Black Uhuru
77: Anthony B
78: Sizzla
79: Capleton
80: Jah Cure
81: Damian Marley
82: Mei Tei Sho
83: Meï Teï Shô
84: General Dub
85: Kaly Live Dub
86: Brain Damage
87: Zenzile
88: High Tone
89: Fedayi Pacha
90: Löbe Radiant Dub System
91: Matisyahu
92: Sublime
93: Bob Marley
94: Gnarls Barkley
95: 311
96: Gorillaz
97: OutKast
98: Bob Marley & The Wailers
99: Arctic Monkeys
100: The Strokes
101: Bloc Party
102: Franz Ferdinand
103: Kaiser Chiefs
104: The Kooks
105: The Killers
106: The Libertines
107: We Are Scientists
108: Seeed
109: Fettes Brot
110: Jan Delay
111: Gentleman
112: Culcha Candela
113: Die Fantastischen Vier
114: Absolute Beginner
115: Blumentopf
116: Patrice
117: Katatonia
118: Opeth
119: Anathema
120: My Dying Bride
121: Amorphis
122: Dark Tranquillity
123: Agalloch
124: Paradise Lost
125: Moonspell
126: Oceansize
127: Porcupine Tree
128: Coheed and Cambria
129: Jinx
130: Svadbas
131: Yammat
132: Pips
133: Laufer
134: Darko Rundek
135: PIPS CHIPS & VIDEOCLIPS
136: Let 3
137: Natali Dizdar
138: Fear Factory
139: Rob Zombie
140: Ill Niño
141: Nelly Furtado
142: Beyoncé
143: Christina Aguilera
144: Fergie
145: Gwen Stefani
146: Britney Spears
147: Rihanna
148: Beck
149: The Roots

Ain't that bad.

Take your top 20 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php

My eclectic score is currently

76/100

The 76 related artists for my profile are AFI aiko American Hi-Fi Anti-Flag ATB Bad Religion blink-182 (4) Brooklyn Bounce Capcom Sound Team Evanescence Eve 6 Every Little Thing Fall Out Boy (2) Fatboy Slim Foo Fighters Gabriela Robin George S. Clinton Gigi D'Agostino Good Charlotte (2) Gorillaz Green Day (4) Groove Coverage hitomi Iron Maiden Kasz & Beal Konami Kukeiha Club KoЯn Lagwagon Limp Bizkit (2) Liquid Tension Experiment Massive Attack Metallica Millencolin Moby Mutha's Day Out My Chemical Romance New Found Glory Nirvana No Use for a Name NOFX (2) Opeth ORIGA Osamu Kubota Panic! At the Disco Papa Roach (2) Pennywise (2) Pulsedriver Rammstein Rancid Red Hot Chili Peppers (2) Rise Against Rufio Saves the Day Shaun Imrei Sugarcult Sum 41 (3) Symphony X System of a Down (3) Taking Back Sunday (2) The Chemical Brothers The Movielife The Offspring (2) The Seatbelts The Starting Line The Used (2) The Young Gods Yellowcard (3) 下村陽子 坂本真綾 崎元仁 日比野則彦 桜庭統 梶浦由記 (2) 植松伸夫 (2) 椎名林檎 鬼束ちひろ
My problem with the algorithm is that your score is actually punished for liking similar artists. For example, I love punk, which is why Bad Religion, Offspring, Millencolin and AFI are all in my top five. But just because I love punk doesn't mean I do not also love many other kinds of music ("eclectic: selecting or choosing from various sources").

I suppose you could argue that because punk dominates my top five, I like non-punk relatively less. But perhaps I simply listen to a large quantity of music. Say my entire profile consisted of a hundred Bad Religion tracks, and one track each of nineteen other unrelated artists. My score would be 100/100, which is just stupid. Admittedly, giving a pathological example is a little unfair, since last.fm is supposed to work better as you listen to more tracks and even out your list.

You might think the problem could be avoided by analyzing all of your artists -- perhaps above a minimum threshold, say 5, to reduce outliers. But even then you'll be punished for liking related artists, which makes no sense -- if you like one 80s hair metal band, why wouldn't you like others? So expanding the analysis does not work. The whole idea of similar artists indicating a narrowness in musical taste is intrinsically flawed.

There is also a related, more general problem with last.fm's artist ranking: it only counts number of tracks played, not time listened, when factoring how highly to score each artist. So Dream Theater and Metallica, with their six-minute-plus songs, are not going to appear as highly as Millencolin, with all their two-minutes-minus tracks. Lame. And getting classical music into my top twenty, without concentrating on a single composer, would be difficult indeed. Such a notion is counterintuitive, since you would think that focusing solely on a single classical composer should make me less "eclectic."

So how can we circumvent these issues to generate a more reasonable "eclectic score" for people's musical tastes? I propose that rather than counting top similar artists against the score, we instead count non-similar artists towards it. To put it another way, count the number of genres "covered" by a person's list of artists. The details of doing so are tricky, since "genre" is only vaguely defined, but here is one idea:

1) Make a list of every artist on the user's playlist above the threshold (e.g., 5). These artists form the nodes of the graph we will be building.

2) For each artist on the list, get its list of similar artists.

3) Compare every pair of artists on the list. If one is on the other's list of similar artists, connect the nodes with an edge of weight 1. If not, but they share a similar artist, connect them with an edge of weight 2. If no commonality, no edge. (These values can be tuned.)

4) Now we analyze the graph. We will consider each connected subgraph separately.

5) For each subgraph, compute the diameter (the eccentricity of a vertex v in a graph G is the maximum distance from v to any other vertex. The diameter of a graph G is the maximum eccentricity over all vertices in a graph). Each subgraph represents a "genre cluster." The diameter of the subgraph indicates the cluster's "breadth."

6) Now we just need a formula to compute a total "eclectic score." Like the graph edges, this result can be tuned. One possible reasonable formula is the sum of the diameters of the subgraphs, plus the number of subgraphs. Summing the breadths of the genre clusters makes sense, because each breadth represents how "eclectic" that cluster is. Adding an extra point for each cluster itself is done to represent the added diversity inherent to unconnected genres. Also, if you think about it, any connecting path between two clusters would require the insertion of at minimum one extra node (though in theory there could be an "uber-artist" to whom all artists in both linked clusters relate, this situation seems highly unlikely).

This algorithm avoids the problem of similar artists actually hurting your score. It also does not significantly skew in favor of artists with shorter tracks.

One shortcoming is that the algorithm does not take into account how long it has been since you listened to the artist. Maybe you haven't done so in a really long time. Maybe it was just a phase. On a related note: maybe you have been on last.fm much longer than someone else, and scrobbled many more tracks. Though the algorithm should be somewhat resistant to this problem (and it's arguable whether it's a "problem" at all), it could still skew your results. Or more precisely, people who have not been on last.fm long enough to fully flesh out their tastes will receive a lower score.

One thing that could arguably improve the algorithm would be weighting the genre clusters according to number of track listens somehow, though doing so would reintroduce the track length skewing issue discussed above. But it might still be worth it in case some genre clusters strongly outweigh others. In particular, it might make sense to assign a penalty for genre clusters orders of magnitude stronger than others. Initially, though, I'm leery of such a penalty factor.

Hmm, I really like this algorithm; maybe I'll implement it. For many users it would be a lot of queries, though, meaning it would take a significantly long time to execute. I'll have to think about it.