While tinkering away with Evan Weaver’s sweeper (a ruby gem for updating id3 tags of mp3s based off last.fm’s fingerprint database) I started clicking around my last.fm profile. I’ve been a religious scrobbler for a few years now (nearly 20,000 songs since May 4th, 2004), but I had never stopped to think about how powerful all of this data could be. I mostly used last.fm for its music recommendations; my profile page will suggest artists for me to explore based off what I have listened to in the past.
Today, I discovered an even cooler feature: events. Last.fm knows what I like, and it knows about lots of events (concerts, shows, festivals). By combining this data, the service can build me a custom calendar of upcoming acts that I may be interested in! I’ve created a quick mash-up using 30 boxes iCal support to display the information on the web, but I have already added this calendar to my personal google calendar. Now, even as my music tastes change, and I move around, I will always have calendar of upcoming events in my area that I will likely be interested in attending. It makes even more sense that CBS spent big money to acquire these guys.
