People use it every time they sign in to a music service with Facebook. We caught up with Jones for an email interview, which we present here on the tenth anniversary of scrobbling.
All interviews are edited for length and clarity. Richard Jones, inventor of Audioscrobbler : I had been reading about collaborative filtering algorithms, and it occurred to me it would be fun to try and use them to discover new music. There wasn't really a suitable source of music data to base recommendations on, though. I considered crawling the P2P systems of the time Soulseek was popular back then -- but in , when the world was still reeling from Napster melting down, people who listened to MP3s tended to hoard massive collections of music they had no intention of listening to, just because they could.
This made the list of music you were sharing via P2P a poor data set to base recommendations on -- yes, I downloaded the full Metallica back catalog just because I could, but I didn't really listen to all of it, and I wouldn't want recommendations based on it.
Always-on internet was rapidly becoming the norm, and more and more people were listening to MP3s on their computers with software such as Winamp. So scrobbling was born: I wrote a plug-in for Winamp that reported what was being played in realtime -- the perfect data source for recommending and discovering music.
Early versions of the Audioscrobbler website did little more than present all the data and cross-link everything. You could click an artist name from your profile page, see which tracks by that artist were most popular, click on one of the 'top listeners' of that artist, and end up looking at someone else's music profile who listened to the same artist as you -- then start the process again, clicking on a different artist.
That mechanic was core to the whole experience, and still is today. I had no idea that would be such a fun and interesting thing to explore until I'd built it. I remember thinking I had discovered something pretty cool at that point.
That was the "Audioscrobbler minimum viable product. The next occasion I remember was when I spent some time digging in the logs and running the numbers, a few months after I started. The handful of friends I had initially convinced to install my Winamp plugin "so I can collect enough data for my dissertation" had told all their friends, and before long, I was seeing new people signing up every day from all over the world. People were starting to write about Audioscrobbler in early waxy.
FM is available on Sonos. What is Scrobbling? Scrobbling is a system that tracks your listening habits and uploads them to your Last. Every time you play a track it is added, or scrobbled, to your Last. This allows Last. How do I add Last. See our article on adding music services to Sonos to learn how.
How does Scrobbling work on Sonos? Sonos scrobbles all tracks played in all rooms from any of the following sources:. When does Sonos Scrobble? After a number of songs are listened to through your media player of choice, a window from last. The user has the option of de-selecting songs that they do not wish to scrobble. I scrobbled all of my favorite songs today and now last.
What the fuck is a scrobble? A scrobble is a made up word meant to mean "listeners" or "replays" in the last. You quickly delete all the offenders from your recently-listened list, but is it too late? The phone rings. It was too late. Yeah, I know. You did raise me better than that. Look, mom, I can explain! No, that isn't 'cool now. Scrobbles mean never getting to say you're sorry. It's a self-telling narrative. It's reality TV now, not a fiction film. You're Jessica Simpson, and you didn't know buffalo wings were made out of chicken, not Leonardo DiCaprio who "didn't know" Jack Nicholson had become a sort of father figure to him.
But maybe it's more than that. In case you're unfamiliar, a scrobble is when you do something like listen to a song , and then that something is tracked into a log. It could be private like how iTunes tracks everything you listen to , or displayed publicly like on Last. Most every scrobble-related service lets you edit or hide your activity, or disable scrobbling at will, but the default is displaying everything you do to everybody you know, and usually everybody you don't know as well.
Generally I really like this. I think I have pretty great taste, and when that taste is shared automatically it allows other people to share in the things I'm enjoying, and even kicks off conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
But there's a fundamental change here in how we act as humans. I'm not the first person to notice this, Laura has a great editorial on how we self-edit thanks to Facebook and scrobbles.
One of the things Laura draws parallels with is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. It's a prison designed to allow guards to monitor the activity of all the prisoners from a central vantage point, but with no clear knowledge on the prisoner's part of when exactly he's being watched. Jeremy Bentham called it "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example. I have no idea when somebody might look at my scrobbles, but the very fact that they might changes my behavior.
So, does it change me? Maybe, maybe not. The story above about the party is purely theoretical. I never got invited to those sorts of parties.
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