Tag: music

Forum Post

The last.fm staff posted a small announcement that they are now independent. I've been on last.fm since 2008 and didn't realize they were owned by the CBS corporation that entire time. Apparently CBS bought last.fm in 2007. In that post about the acquisition is this line

CBS understands the Last.fm vision, the importance we place on putting the listener in charge, the vibrant and vocal community, the obsession with music stats, and our determination to offer every song ever recorded.

I imagine last.fm had huge ambitions in their early days. There was no Spotify or major streaming services at that time, so they were in a potential position to become the central place where people came to listen to and discover music.

Looking back at my own music habits at that time, I was either spending money in iTunes to buy albums or individual tracks for $0.99, but that was also locking me into the Apple ecosystem because all music on iTunes was protected with DRM (they later introduced music without DRM and thus increased the price to $1.29, which is still the price to this day). I remember signing up for last.fm for the ability to internet radio streaming and discovering music. It was pretty unimpressive looking back, but at the time it felt amazing.

I haven't used last.fm much since then, I had a brief time from 2014-2016 where I had scrobbling set up with Spotify, but something broke and I never noticed or bothered to fix it. With this announcement of them becoming independent, it's reignited my interest in scrobbling and tracking the music I'm listening to. I've also been working on moving away from Spotify and going back to manually managing my music like its the year 2006.

Here is my last.fm profile: https://www.last.fm/user/jmanator

Interval Trainer

Over the past few months, I have been getting back into playing guitar after a fairly long hiatus. I even started taking guitar lessons. My practice has involved playing a lot of bluegrass fiddle tunes and learning carter-style arrangements of old country and bluegrass songs.

Playing bluegrass with others involves playing solos, or "taking breaks". This just means improvising over the melody of the song. As I've been inching closer toward working on my own improvisational skills, I've realized that I don't have as much intuition about what each interval in the chromatic scale truly sounds like. I want to get to the point where I can listen to a song and recognize when the 4th chord is played vs the 5th or in a break when someone adds in a flat 5.

To help myself train my ear to recognize each interval, I vibe coded a tool using Claude code. The page has two main parts: play each interval at your own pace and a quiz that will play intervals at random and you have to choose the correct one. I also added some descriptions to the intervals to help myself think about what those intervals feel like. There is also a toggle to show the "blue notes".

This is one part of my journey to being able to both improvise better but also transcribe music faster.

Moanin’ The Blues

I reached a major life milestone this week: I fell in love with Hank Williams. This is how I know I’m getting old. The music is timeless though.

Other notable artists this week: Ethel Cain and Kendrick Lamar. I need to find some new music asap.