First Last.FM evaluation

Simply put, matching is crappy; any kind of matching.
For starters, there is no (fuzzy) matching of artists played: 'Gilbert & Sullivan' and 'Gilbert and Sullivan' are two completely distinct artists, with each having their own info page and scrobble count.
Further, my 'Tast-o-meter' with Litrik evolved from the obvious Very Low (no artists in common), to Low (Hans Zimmer in common), to Medium (Hans Zimmer, Bear McCreary and some other film music composers), to Very Low (no artists in common). And that while both Litrik's and my top 3 of the week contain Hans Zimmer.
Also, after more than 300 songs played, Last.FM has finally dignified itself with providing me with neighbours; the first of which having the compatibility rating 'Very Low' (Gregorian in common), the second having the same rating with an otherwise unspecified 'few artists' in common, and all the rest having no artists in common. Litrik, previously with Medium compatibility, is not in the list.


I'll continue to scrobble songs, hoping the law of large numbers will ensure more reliable results. Given the amount of music in my collection, this will take some time though.

Last.FM

Earlier this week two collegues of mine created an account on Last.FM and one of them started scrobbling right away. Today, I followed suit. After installing a plugin in Winamp, title, artist and album of every song I play are sent to Last.FM for analysis. Not only that, but some information about the author is pulled, so you get a brief biography, a number of tags and similar artists for you to go in search of new music. Also sent back to you, the consumer of this free service, is a link to buy the CD on Amazon.

I wanted to test the extensiveness of their database and, much to my surprise, it covers more than I'd have thought. But of course I wouldn't be me if I couldn't find some obscure artists that would certainly not be in their database.
I was surprised to find out that they do know about the Puppini Sisters (a contemporary Andrews Sisters clone, which, incidently they also knew of). However, they didn't know anything about Boogie Phil and the Woogie Band (0 plays scrobbled) and they mistook Mine (an obscure Belgian folk group) with Mine (an even more obscure Swedish group without even a home page).
Last.FM also didn't know about 'Royal Trumpeters' by 'Verbeeck Band Organ', but I can't blame them for that; and Arnold Loxham's Wurlitzer March falls into the same category.
I was surprised to learn they do know Northwest Sinfonia and that it has, amongst others, tags such as Cavedog (RIP) and Total Annihilation.