I set up a Last.fm profile a month or so ago (I know, I'm a late starter) and had been listening to my library fairly regularly until about a week ago, when I managed to get a Spotify login, since when I've definitely been using Spotify more. I'm not going to compare the two in terms of technology (although Spotify's sound quality and streaming are better), but I was interested to find that I'm using them both in different ways, and I think these reflect the different ways we add meaning to music at a time of musical superabundance.
Last.fm is a more public, tribal (to use the current blog-speak), social environment. Because other people can see what you're listening to and because what Last.fm recommends is based on these listening choices I've noticed that I've been choosing music with these factors in mind. This is partly due to the fact that as I'm trying to promote my music, (which is somewhere in the jazz/nu jazz spectrum), to other Last.fm users I've been largely only listening to the kind of music to which those people who I think might enjoy my tunes are also likely be listening. (i.e. I've been building a profile that looks like theirs.) I don't mean I'm doing this in a cynical way - I genuinely like jazz and nu jazz, obviously, and I like all the artists I've added to my library. But I like other styles too, which I haven't been listening to so much, because I haven't wanted to be publicly seen doing so in the Last.fm environment. (I think this would have been the case even if I hadn't been trying to promote my own tunes, although perhaps to a lesser extent.)
Now with Spotify on the other hand I can enjoy all my secret musical pleasures in private! For example, my last five listened to artists on Last.fm are Femi Kuti, Parov Stelar, Micatone, Ojos de Brujo, and Lonnie Liston Smith (all of whom I genuinely like :) My last five on Spotify are Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ron Sexsmith, Papa Wemba, The Velvet Underground, and Jimmy Cliff.
If I had to sum up the differences between the two ways of listening, I'd say that Last.fm feels like the modern-day equivalent of travelling home with a new vinyl LP on the bus and hoping that other people notice how cool you are. (I don't mean this is a bad thing!) To keep the LP analogy going, Spotify feels more like finding a box of once-loved records in the attic and realising how much they mean to you.
Now, regarding the "meaning of music" part of my blog title - well, much like the meaning of life, there isn't one. (I imagine a Mayfly around 2pm saying to itself "This is all well and good, but what's it all about?") Rather (again like life) music has many meanings - all the meanings we give it.
Music is, to say the least, no longer scarce. (I read in a blog the other day that to all intents and purposes there's now an infinite supply available to us online - in the sense that there's more than we can possibly listen to in our lifetimes.) This has implications for its monetary value, but it also has implications for its meaning to us. I think in order for music to continue meaning something in an age of musical superfluity, we have to make an effort to give meaning to it ourselves.
One way of doing this is to pay for it :) This isn't just special pleading from a musician; I think that by giving music monetary value, we also give it added value to ourselves, at least that's my experience as a music consumer.
Another way of giving music meaning in an age of abundance is by rationing it for ourselves.
I think this is what some of us are doing when we use a Last.fm-type music site. We're putting limitations on what we listen to, because we're trying to use our musical tastes to say something about ourselves. We're using music as a signifier - to show that we belong to a certain tribe; to show that we're a certain kind of person. (There are of course many people who are not setting these limitations - you can find them on Last.fm with a library of thousands of artists, with even the highest played only ever having been played once. I don't think the music means anything to them, it's just the acquisition that has meaning..)
The Spotify-type experience lets us add meaning to music in another, more private way. It's more about relating to music as just an individual; not part of a group or tribe at that particular moment. It's the singing along to old songs whose words you can't believe you remember; the remembering of who you were when you last heard them.
Of course, this is just my experience, and there's some blurring between these two forms of listening - not all the private stuff is purely nostalgic, and not all the public stuff purely self-defining. (And I'm not suggesting that our public musical persona is a sham - it would be a strange person who didn't actually like what they professed to like! - simply that it may be slightly constrained. When we're trying to say something about ourselves, perhaps we don't want to be saying everything about ourselves.) I think though that Last.fm and Spotify do represent a distinction between these two modes of listening, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone feels a similar way!
OK, I'm off to listen to Two Banks of Four on Last.fm, and Tom Waits singing "Ruby's Arms" on Spotify. :)
Cheers,
Chris
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