We were listening to ‘artists that sound like Cornelius’ or some such yesterday, and in amongst all the folkywolky electronica, we got Incubus.

Very strange.

b) looking through the “related artists” plain text output from their web services, I was given the “People who listen to Metallica also listen to:” most popular page. I was amused to see, among the predictable Iron Maiden at number 1, Megadeth, G’n'R, Pantera etc., further down the page, Jamiroquai, and there, near the bottom, G3 - aren’t they the opera group?

: P

There are plenty of things out there that collect data on you. That Oyster card, your Tescos Club Card, your Amazon account. Every time you blip, click or scan something, data is being collected. Data that’s generally used to sell you stuff. One day, it might even be useful. Or perhaps not.

Last.fm gathers data on what you listen to yes, but I doubt they’ll use that information to sell you life insurance. Not sure about them monitoring where you got it from - do you mean CD vs. bittorrent/Kazaa vs. iTunes/Napster? I guess their plugin could read whether or not a file was protected, and maybe even checksum it to see if it matched known copies floating around on P2P networks, but it sounds a little over the top. Most of the plugins appear to have source available, so you could audit the code yourself to make sure that nothing untoward is being sent. If it is, you could re-write the plugin so that it doesn’t send the data you don’t want it to send, but still get the benefit of all the music recommendation.

But wait! What if the precompiled modules have code added that’s not in the downloadable source? If you are really that paranoid, you could always set up a packet sniffer on your network and watch exactly what’s being sent between you and them. Or you could DPA their asses. A slightly less in your face approach, and one with far more geek cred would be to use the web services that they make available to access your own profile and see what’s there.

It’s not all bad, eh?

*hackles raise*

: P