Visualising listening habits via Last.fm: Lee Byron
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Visualising information is a fascinating area and, as much of a fan as I am of Last.fm, the user charts tend to be a pretty uninspiring sight. Long-term users’ charts like my own also tend to be fairly static. If Last.fm were to employ the services of Lee Byron, things might be rather different:
Algorithmically generated posters based on statistical information provided by Last.fm software. Every song listened to by a particular user over an eighteen month period of time is recorded and used to create the visualization. Each colored band represents a musical artist, progressing left to right through the eighteen month span growing wider when listening was more frequent, and skinnier when it was not. The hue of the artist represents the time of the first listen for the particular user: cooler colors represent artists who have been listened to for a long period of time while warmer colors represent artists who are more recent in the user’s listening habits.
How nice to have your Last.fm personal homepage with this information presented in Flash allowing you to interact with all that data and/or project it as a gradually morphing illustration of the music you’re listening to… With at least 15 million users, Last.fm would need to do some serious hardware upgrades, but it would be music geek heaven. Following links from Lee Byron’s initial page leads to a rather lovely interactive graph of Artist Popularity Over Time (warning: Applet, which seems to only intermittently play nicely with Firefox on OSX):
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Links: Lee Byron/megamu, Last.fm, Information Aesthetics
Via: Mediaor
