Last.fm Music Map

[packbat]

Via jfs: http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/



It's a map of many (all but ~17000) of the artists indexed on last.fm, spread out in two dimensions* according to the similarity data that site has between each pair of artists. One of the cooler features here is the Interactive Map - you can look up any indexed artists and they mark them with flags. I generated the following map shown by entering a comma-delineated list** of my favorite artists and taking a screenshot.

* What would happen if it were three dimensions or more? I guess it's inconvenient to render...

** Names separated by commas. Example: Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, XTC. If you enter the list of your favorite artists this way, it works - even if the names have commas, like Peter, Paul and Mary.



I assume some interpretation could be put to why my flags all fall on a line between Avril Lavinge and Muse, but I'm not going to.

Comments

[packbat.livejournal.com]

On the whatsit page - technical notes or whatever - they says they used the tags to sort the artists. For whatever reason, for example, punk is classified as "rock".

My main complaint is that it's a raw image, meaning you can't zoom in to see bubbles behind bubbles, etc. Bear in mind that this seems to just be an amateur, first-try project.