Music Search

LastFm is a widely known Internet radio station and community web site. I have an account on this and have for a while. It allows you to build recommendations, using the concepts of 'love' and 'ban'. I once when through 100's of songs 'ban'ing them, and it was quite interesting how the system kept coming up with more for me to ban, which I kept doing, obsessively.

Here's the usual query set, with searches either on 'Start Your Last.fm' button or search on the web site itself. The former is basically artist search only and some of these searches don't work. You'll find out which when you click on the links:

• David Bowie Low.


• David Bowie "Heroes".


• David Bowie lodger.


• Iggy Pop lust for life.


• David Bowie the man who sold the world. [2nd Search].


• David Bowie hunky dory. [2nd Search].


• David Bowie Aladdin Sane.


• David Bowie ziggy stardust. [2nd Search].

A search just on David Bowie yields is profile and a ready made playlist, which starts playing when the page is loaded.

The interface changed part way through my first session, which was a bit irritating frankly. The "Heroes" and 'Low' searches were done on an interface which was different to the others therefore (I did the searches over two separate days, and didn't bother repeating them). In the first interface, searches with the artist and song title were acceptable, in the second this was variable. I've repeated the search on the site where something is returned from 'play' in the second case.

Searhes on the web site can be done on 'music', 'label' or 'tag'. You can switch between the 'tabs' on the returned hitlist.

Posts in the series are available here.