LastGraph: a smashing look on your music history

Written on 1st June 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

I remember when I had first installed Last.fm on my Mac. When Last.fm was done scrobbling all the songs I had played so far, hours of studying all the interesting tables and numbers that showed up followed. After years of playing music with no specified overview of what I listened and when, Last.fm answered almost all my questions. But now there’s a new kid on the block which even fascinates me more. It’s called LastGraph and offers some eye-candy in the form of Last.fm data visualizations. Here’s one:

This is a time-line poster. It took me five minutes of waiting before LastGraph had analyzed my data and another 2 minutes to crunch it into this “ocean, medium detailed” poster. So it took this web-app some time, yet I love the result. As it turns out, I’m quite predictable when it comes to listening music. Every time I go to a concert, I listen to that artist or band obsessively. See Kaiser Chiefs in November, Arctic Monkeys in December, Eels in March, and The Wombats in April. The Joy Division spike is caused by the excellent movie Control from Anton Corbijn. And can you tell when I got my iPod Touch?

If you want a closer look, it’s a matter of looking up the Artist History Graph. By crunching out the Kaiser Chiefs data, you can tell it was a one-day show. The love for this rock act didn’t last till after the concert (blue arrow):

All the data is available for exporting in Excel, CVS, and JSON formats. For 10 dollars a year, you get a premium account which comes with hotlinking to your graphs and some small dynamic signature images you can use for forums or other similar things.

So, LastGraph has shown me I’m predictable when it comes to listening music. To get an insight like this, and a bunch of more graphs and time lines, browse to LastGraph. The site is written and run by Andrew Godwin, and I think he has a great job. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for him, ’cause it wouldn’t make sense if Last.fm didn’t acquire this pure API magic.