Audioscrobbler indexes your MP3 usage

What I did a long time ago was that I had a plugin in Winamp that transmitted all the music I played onto a server which I controlled. That server processed the information, got a thumbnail from Amazon.com with web services and uploaded it to this site onto MP3 I Play

To me it was very much an excuse to play around with the technology and familiarise myself with ID3 tagging in Python and the Amazon.com web services using pyAmazon.

With Audioscrobbler they've taken this whole thing seriously, done it much much better and opened it up to the public.

"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."

from About page

Audioscrobbler appears to be based in London, UK and it appears they're using PHP and Java for their back end stuff. It makes me happy also to read that:

"Audioscrobbler plugins are all Open Source. We're not keeping the data to ourselves either: Anonymous Audioscrobbler listening data is released under a Creative Commons License."

I'm really quite impressed. There's little value to the individual for using Audioscrobbler except maybe the fact that you can match your music taste with other people and that way make some new friends. Good work guys!