Isle Of...

The brilliant new discoveries that I highlight in Isle Of..., I'm sure you know by now, are rarely new to anyone but me. Laughing Cow cheese, for instance, has been delighting palates for ages. This time around I'm featuring something that's no exception:



Isle Of Last.fm. But more specifically, I've recently become addicted to reading the artist biographies on Last.fm.

It's not like I've been a cave-dweller for the years that Last.fm's been chilling on the internet, being awesome. I downloaded the scrobbling software awhile ago, but since I rarely listen to music on my computer (preferring instead to listen to songs on my iPod, which I've always manually updated), I wasn't able to really use it. Recently though, I decided to bite the bullet and begin automatically syncing my iPod. Despite having virtually identical music libraries on the iPod and my computer hard drive, I felt a brief moment of terror as my cursor hovered over the "Sync" button that I knew would erase every last bit of data from the device. Relying so much on technology that's well beyond my control has always been a little scary. But the point is this: I now automatically sync and thus can scrobble properly. Hooray!

As a play-count nerd, this kind of service is very appealing to me. So I've begun listening to more and more music on my computer, and every song that plays brings up a band bio on the Last.fm software. And I just can't stop reading. There's so much I don't know about the bands that I listen to! For instance, how connected they all are-- I'm finding that many of my favorites have toured together, for one thing. One of the members of the Fruit Bats is now a member of the Shins. It's a small indie world, after all.

Of course, there is the slight issue that the bios are wikis, able to be edited by anyone with a Last.fm login and password. I could write slanderous things about Conor Oberst's proclivities for sock-puppet porn (citation needed) if I so desired (I don't... or do I?). But hey, it's worked for Wikipedia all these years. If obsessive internet addicts can't be trusted to tell the truth, who can?

I don't think I know enough that's not purely anecdotal about any bands to edit their bios for real. Sometimes I do go through and edit them for grammar, punctuation and AP style, though. You know how I roll.

One more thing: Now that I've got the scrobbling thing down, my musical habits are visible to the world at large. Just as one need only unalphabetize a book or DVD from my collections to really get me steaming, I feel like I good way to exact revenge on me would be to mess with my Last.fm. Slip my iPod out of my purse when I'm not looking and play all the embarrassing songs so that when I get around to scrobbling, the whole world knows just how many Ashlee Simpson tracks I've accumulated over the years. Just in case, I'll pre-preemptively come clean: it's 17.