Scrobbling Your Music: (What is, How to)

What is scrobbling? Most people don't know. Heck, I myself didn't know till five or six months ago.

So I'll start with the meaning:

scrobble: skrob·bul (ˈskrɒbəll)

[verb] To automatically add the tracks you play to your Last.fm profile with a piece of software called a Scrobbler

1.  If I'm not scrobbling the music I hear, it doesn't count!

If you have an iPod, you're probably using iTunes to sync it, just like me. And you know what I really enjoy about iTunes? The play count. I love seeing which songs I've played the most.

Okay, so let me put this in simple words. Last.fm is sort of like a music-cum-social networking website.  You signup for an account with them, then you download this little program called last.fm scrobbler. (It's available for Mac, Windows & Linux & is compatible with a lot of media players including iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player. It also scrobbles from your iPod! There's even scrobbler for iPhone & Android.) Once it's downloaded, install it & login with your last.fm username & password & voila! Now the scrobbler will probably ask if you want to scrobble all the songs you've listened to before. And when you connect your iPod, it will ask whether you want to scrobble from it too.

So overtime you start you media player to play songs, the scrobbler will open too. Now go & check out your profile on last.fm! (here's mine)

You can see your total nnumber of plays, which songs you've played the most (you can choose to see them according to last 7 days, last 3 months, last 6 months & overall) You can see the number of different musicians in your music collection & which are the artistes you listen to the most.

And there's the social networking aspect- whenever you check out someone else's profile, you can see how musically compatible you are with someone. And you can add them as a friend if you like.

There was just one sad little thing about it - not many Indians have discovered last.fm. I love being a pretty early adopter, but it can just get a little lonely.

Now some of you may think that scrobbling is a waste of time, but I absolutely love it! You can even put nifty little charts on your blog- check out mine in the sidebar- They're my most played songs of all time And then there are nifty badges & charts that you can put in your blog's sidebar. Check out mine- I'm displaying my top 5 tracks, my top 10 artists, some of my favorite album covers & my total number of scrobbles (I joined last.fm on 18th March 2010 & started scrobbling on 10 April 2010). The charts are highly customizable, both in style & what info you choose to show in it. I love to see stats of the music I listen to. Even when I'm on holiday with no internet access, the scrobbler keeps doing it's job & sends all the info to last.fm the moment I get connected to the internet.
I'm breaking into 1500 plays as I'm typing this!

Are you on last.fm? Do you think you'll join it & start scrobbling? Or do you have any questions? Leave a comment!
Pssst- I've even created a group on last.fm for Indian Bloggers & for Mumbai, so don't forget to join!

Enjoy,