On my recent holiday in San Francisco I bought an iPod. A big 80 gig fucker. It was cheap, all praises due to the two-dollar pound and the absence of staff at Heathrow’s NOTHING TO DECLARE.

Out of everyone I know, you’d think I’d have been the first to buy an iPod. Loyal Mac user through the dark years and out the other side. Irresponsible handler of money. Owner of a million pocket electronic devices. Devout music listener. I even swore by MiniDiscs for a couple of years, so it’s a bit odd that I’ve bought my first iPod some six years after they launched and after even my most musically ambivalent peers are probably on their second or third.

Mac haters and penny-pinchers can save their warnings. I’ve not bought it for battery life, weight, size or even those oh so unimportant aesthetics. The reason I’m at last inclined to haul half my record collection around in my pocket is lastFM.

For those that haven’t used lastFM it is essentially a website that tracks the music you’re listening to and then compiles you charts, offers you recommendations and shows you what likeminded people are listening to. It’s also a great way to spy on your friends.

I downloaded the scrobbler (a plugin that tells the site what you’re playing) a couple of years ago when I was still mainly playing music on vinyl and thusly not recording many plays on lastFM. As lastFM has added features and my iTunes library has grown I’ve found myself playing more and more of my music via the computer. It’s all plugged into the same amp and speakers so the sound is much of a muchness. I’m no audiophile anyway, youthful walkman abuse probably killed the subtlety of my ears.

In the last few months lastFM has really improved. They now offer all kinds of charts and ways for you to analyse your own listening habits from weekly top track charts to 6-monthly top album charts. The recently added gig listings feature is phenomenal. It only alerts me to live shows of artists I listen to, eliminating the trawl through Time Out’s listing pages. In the few months the service has been running I’ve probably booked tickets to five acts I would have otherwise missed. It wants me to go to the Princess Diana memorial concert though, I’m not sure what that’s about.

The recommendations part of lastFM doesn’t work very well for me. Since my top three artists are pretty large Hiphop acts it thinks I want to listen to an endless stream of mediocre rappers. LastFM’s Hiphop listener base isn’t very large compared to the indie-rock crowd so the recommendations it throws up aren’t particularly sophisticated or sensitive to me. Right now it’s recommending me Talib Kweli and The Roots. A human-being could tell that if I’ve listened to all that Hiphop and don’t play those two then it’s probably because I’m not interested in them. LastFM just assumes I haven’t heard them.

Unlike a lot of people I know, downloading hasn’t changed the way I listen to music. I still buy music. A lot of music. New and second hand. A lot of vinyl. Not having many CDs meant that iTunes has only come into it’s own after years and years of slowly building. I’ve never put much effort into transposing my collection to the computer. Until now.

The last time the internet changed my musical habits was in the mid 90s when I first got online. There wasn’t much in the way of music or musical coverage on the world wide web, not for a few years but there was Usenet. Discovering the Hiphop Usenet newsgroup (the precursor to web forums) opened up a whole new world of music for me. It exposed me not just to underground Hiphop which would get it’s day in the spotlight a few years later anyway but more importantly to regional Hiphop. The posters on the newsgroup hailed from allover America (and the world) and over the years of talking shit with them I inadvertantly soaked up some of their tastes. It kind of meant I fell out of love with the Hiphop scene in London which was pretty one-track-minded and frankly not much fun anyway but it’s given me my own taste which I don’t share completely with anyone.

So it’s been over ten years since any great change in how I mess with music. Now with lastFM I’m driven to switch things up. If I’m going to be playing vinyl less and less then I’m gonna have to record it to the computer. I’ve been borrowing a lot of stuff I already own from work on CD and adding it to iTunes but an awful lot of stuff is gonnna need to be recorded from wax. That’s good for this blog because I’ll be dropping taster tracks from interesting albums as I digitise them. It takes time though. I’m already trying to catalogue my collection on discogs. Mission.

I won’t be chucking the vinyl. I’ll still be playing it out. DJing off computers spoils all the fun and shoulders were made for carrying record bags. I also find myself playing something on iTunes while reading the liner notes off the record sleeve. I can even read the label while the music plays which previously required very good twirly-head-vision. Cake and eat it too.

If you play music on iTunes or equivalent music software and you have any interest in expanding your listening, keeping up with live shows or talking to folks with similar tastes I urge you to get on lastFM. In fact even if you’re not gonna check your charts or anything you might as well sign up just so I can spy on you. It’s all free and if you download the right plugin it will now log your iPod plays aswell. If you’re on there already then friend me up.

Now I’m off to record the “New York Art Quartet” LP…