I recently installed Audioscrobbler, a plugin for XMMS, Winamp, iTunes, and just about every other music player under the sun on Linux, Windows and Mac. Audioscrobbler records the names of the songs you listen to, and puts it in a community database that you can later access via webservices. Not only does it give you good recommendations based on listening patters over a large number of people, it also allows for tagging – thus finally bringing the folksonomy phenomenon to music. Essentially Audioscrobbler is the del.icio.us or flickr of music.

Tied to this is last.fm, a website that lets the Audioscrobbler community interact, but also a business with a non-obnoxious business model – All the software is open source, you can have a normal account that is free, and it appears all the social aspects of the system are also free. They seem to be making money with a small number of ads,and a premier account that lets you listen to music streamed from their site – a personal radio station that will play music based on your personal statistics.

You can find me on there as soulcatcher.