Audioscrobbler flaws

The Audioscrobbler method of building musical profiles in order to locate new artists is fairly interesting.

Audioscrobbler is a computer system that builds up a detailed profile of your musical taste. After installing an Audioscrobbler Plugin, your computer sends the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler Server. With this information, the Audioscrobbler server builds you a 'Musical Profile'. Statistics from your Musical Profile are shown on your Audioscrobbler User Page, available for everyone to view.

There are lots of people using Audioscrobbler, but you probably won't be interested in most of them. The Audioscrobbler Server calculates which people are most similar to you, based on shared musical taste, so you can take a look at what your peers are listening to.

With this information, Audioscrobbler is able to automatically generate suggestions for new songs/artists you might like. These suggestions are based on the same principles as Amazon's "People who bought this also bought X,Y,Z", but because the Audioscrobbler data is what people are actually listening to, the suggestions tend to make more sense than Amazon.

My profile

However, listeners like myself, with deep libraries, possibly get slightly misleading statistics. I have nearly 600 Bob Dylan songs, so when I randomize my iTunes list, Dylan frequently gets played. In other words, one particular Dylan track is not played often, but Dylan in general is.

I bought the Camper Van Beethoven box set a few months ago


"Cigarettes & Carrot Juice - The Santa Cruz Years" (Camper Van Beethoven)

, and played the entire thing a couple times (83 tracks). Does this mean CVB is my second favorite band (or third, since Audioscrobbler is extremely literal, and counts Dylan, Bob differently than Bob Dylan. Eventually, the Audioscrobbler people claim, these will be merged together)? No, not really.

I suspect Lightnin' Hopkins will soon jump to the top of the list too.

So Audioscrobbler (and my style of randomizing my playlist) is weighted towards artists with extensive catalogs - (Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Conet Project, Tom Waits, etc. - are over-represented.

So what's the answer? Who knows, I'm just a kvetcher, not a belly itcher.