Social Tags and Music
There are a number of social music sites out there right now, like last.fm, MusicMobs and MusicStrands
that let you attach social tags to songs or playlists. Over time a
site like last.fm can build up a rather rich set of such tags.
For instance, here's a raw feed of the top 250 tags at last.fm. There are lots of genre tags (rock and alternative), as well as personal labels (seenlive, favorite), and mood tags (chill, sad) as well as qualitative tags (officially sh*t).
Last.fm offers a 'tag radio' where you can listen to music that has been tagged with a particular tag. Feel like listening to some sad songs? try this: Sad Radio (listen). Want to listen to some face shreding guitar? try: Guitar Heros (listen). And of course there is Lord of the Rings Radio - all Lotr, all of the time (listen), where you can hear Enya, Howard Shore, Led Zeppelin and Battlelore (the Finnish, epic-metal band that plays 'sons of the riddermark').
One has to be a bit careful when using these tags though, because you don't always get what you'd expect. If you listen to Love Radio (listen), you might expect to hear nothing but love songs, but of course lots of taggers use the word 'love' to tag songs that they love as opposed to tagging songs about love. So you may have a romantic ballad follows by Battlelore's Sons of the Riddermark, if someone loved that song enough to tag it as such.
The real value in the tags surfaces when many, many people have tagged songs. The personal tags like 'seen live' and 'I Own It' become noise, and with lots of tags per song, real patterns can emerge. With enough tags, we can cross the semantic gap and start searching for music with words that describe the music such as: "play me some sad love songs with a Lord of the Rings theme with great guitar solos".
For instance, here's a raw feed of the top 250 tags at last.fm. There are lots of genre tags (rock and alternative), as well as personal labels (seenlive, favorite), and mood tags (chill, sad) as well as qualitative tags (officially sh*t).
Last.fm offers a 'tag radio' where you can listen to music that has been tagged with a particular tag. Feel like listening to some sad songs? try this: Sad Radio (listen). Want to listen to some face shreding guitar? try: Guitar Heros (listen). And of course there is Lord of the Rings Radio - all Lotr, all of the time (listen), where you can hear Enya, Howard Shore, Led Zeppelin and Battlelore (the Finnish, epic-metal band that plays 'sons of the riddermark').
One has to be a bit careful when using these tags though, because you don't always get what you'd expect. If you listen to Love Radio (listen), you might expect to hear nothing but love songs, but of course lots of taggers use the word 'love' to tag songs that they love as opposed to tagging songs about love. So you may have a romantic ballad follows by Battlelore's Sons of the Riddermark, if someone loved that song enough to tag it as such.
The real value in the tags surfaces when many, many people have tagged songs. The personal tags like 'seen live' and 'I Own It' become noise, and with lots of tags per song, real patterns can emerge. With enough tags, we can cross the semantic gap and start searching for music with words that describe the music such as: "play me some sad love songs with a Lord of the Rings theme with great guitar solos".
Posted by Thomas Lord on August 23, 2006 at 05:58 PM EDT #
Posted by Toby on August 23, 2006 at 09:44 PM EDT #