Yesterday I began playing around with an interesting community service called Audioscrobbler. Essentially it is a system that monitors the music that you listen to on your computer and then recommends new artists based on the listening habits of other users on the network. Geeky but actually pretty cool.

After installing a software plugin, your computer sends the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler Server. With this information, the system then builds you a ‘Musical Profile’, from which it then 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.

If you are interested in trying it out (it’s free) here is what you need:

1. Register to get your own username and profile.
2. Download a plugin for your music player, and enter your login details.
3. Listen to some tunes :-)

The great thing about this system is that it is designed to be completely unobtrusive – once you have set it up it will work silently in the background monitoring the songs you listen to and sending the stats to the website. To get a better idea of how it all works you can see my statistics by clicking here.

I have also installed a special plugin on my blog that will display the last 10 songs I have played (look in the sidebar on the right).

Let me know what you think.

ADDENDUM: PC iPod uers might be interested in the AudioPod Plugin (best used in conjunction with Katapult to automatically launch AudioPod when your iPod is connected to your PC.)