Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

In anticipation of the soon to be released album Friend Opportunity, I've been listening to a lot of music by Deerhoof. This is quirky stuff to be sure - but it is growing on me. The neat thing is that I can listen to Deerhoof all day to let it grow on me for free and it is all perfectly legal. Here's how:

• Generate a link to a playlist (in XSPF format) of Deerhoof's top 50 tracks using last.fm's web services. The link is: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/Deerhoof/toptracks.xspf.

•  Plug this XSPF url into the XspfResolver and tell it to 'Napsterize'. This generates a pretty printed version of the playlist with links into the Napster catalog to play the songs (remember that Napster lets you listen to each song in their million+ song catalog 5 times for free). At the bottom of this page is a Napster link for the entire playlist. Click on that link to start listening to the top 50 Deerhoof songs. (Or just click here if you are a bit lazy).

I think this example shows what music is going to be like on the web in the near future. Some websites will provide playlists (last.fm in this example), some websites will provide services to resolve these playlists to a particular catalog or catalogs (the XspfResolver in this case), and other sites will provide the music (like Napster is doing here). It's all part of the new emerging music ecosystem. One more step closer to the day when music flows like water.