Number one with a bullet ..


Music charts have traditionally been a good way for people to find new music.  Every week there's a new set of top ten (or top 40, or top 200) songs to browse and listen to, and perhaps one is a keeper.  



Nowadays there are a number of online music charts to explore ... There's trusty old Billboard, with its traditional charts organized by genre.  Yahoo is now offering a Konfabulator widget that shows the charts from Yahoo! Music Unlimited.

My favorite set of online charts are from last.fm. What's unique about the last.fm charts compared to the traditional Billboard charts is that Last.fm is tracking song plays, not song purchases.  The more a song is played, the higher it goes in the charts while a song that is purchased but is never played goes nowhere.  I've probably purchased 20 CDs this year, most of them based on the last.fm charts, and I've happily discovered bands that I didn't know before from Franz Ferdinand, to Death Cab for Cutie.  The chart topper at last.fm this week is 'Such Great Heights' by thePostal Service, and it's next on my "to buy" list.


Posted on: Jan 31, 2006

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

I would say that those last.fm charts are just stale and tragic (Codpiece and all). The really disappointing thing with all these sites is that is they play "music like this" ("if you like this, you might like this"). No wonder the music industry is constantly looking backwards and that there is a postpunk, folk, prog, crooner etc revival at the moment. Anyway - that Postal Service track is a free MP3 download from music.download.com (Postal Service heavily inspired by 80s bands like Scritti Politti and Prefab Sprout)

Posted by Halvard Halvorsen on February 01, 2006 at 05:47 AM EST #

Interesting. I first came across "Such Great Heights" via a very wispy cover version from the "Garden State" soundtrack. I do have to wonder if the controversy surrounding the song and Apple's most recent ad campaign had a knock-on effect in these other online services. I knew that this http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/17/apples_tv_ads_are_a_.html led to this http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/01/24.12.shtml ...but it's amusing to think that boingboing readers are beating a track to last.fm to play the song alone.

Posted by Adam Lindsay on February 01, 2006 at 06:17 AM EST #

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