Last.fm lets you see your 'neighbours,' people whose music tastes are similar to yours. I've been fascinated by this list for a long time, and have taken to reading through the favored artists of each 'neighbour' to see if they already knew of artists or groups that I should be listening to.
It's actually worked. I first encountered Snow Patrol through a neighbour, and Adam's recommendation clinched it. (Though that's perhaps a misleading statement, because Adam and I trade music recommendations so often that he's been a regular on my neighbours list for some time now.)
It hit me, though: for the most part, neighbours were always slice-of-life snapshots of similarity. Single notes, if you will. If you picture a person's music taste as a chord of notes, then can we all agree to beat this metaphor into the ground and say that most of the people on the neighbours list had musical tastes that matched only a note or two in my chord.
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Last.fm lets you see your 'neighbours,' people whose music tastes are similar to yours. I've been fascinated by this list for a long time, and have taken to reading through the favored artists of each 'neighbour' to see if they already knew of artists or groups that I should be listening to.
It's actually worked. I first encountered Snow Patrol through a neighbour, and Adam's recommendation clinched it. (Though that's perhaps a misleading statement, because Adam and I trade music recommendations so often that he's been a regular on my neighbours list for some time now.)
It hit me, though: for the most part, neighbours were always slice-of-life snapshots of similarity. Single notes, if you will. If you picture a person's music taste as a chord of notes, then can we all agree to beat this metaphor into the ground and say that most of the people on the neighbours list had musical tastes that matched only a note or two in my chord.
I've always thought of my taste in music as more agglutinative than unusual; it seems like each friendship I make adds another couple of CDs to the music collection. The end result is a little schizophrenic, but I guess I'd always assumed that there would be someone else out there who was like me.
I decided to run the 'reverse neighbours' script, which does a rather intensive search to determine if you show up as someone's neighbour. As you might guess from the title of this post, I am nobody's little snowflake.
It seems to be pretty easy to find someone who digs modern folk music, or disco house / trance, or modern alt-rock (with maybe just enough emo to justify some eyeliner), or who grew up a closet Steely Dan ... but I guess trying to find someone else who is all of those at once was a bit of a long shot.
Ah well, it was worth checking.
If you're curious, I'm domesticat on last.fm.
Oh yes, and there's another post after this one for those of you with accounts. You'll have to be logged in to see it.
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