Life: The Movie .. starring you!

While listening to The John Moore Show on the radio, John made an interesting comment about the relationship of music and commerce and its evolution. The fact that merchants have moved recently from muzak form the 20’s to more current theme based music in their stores.

The idea behind this movement is to throw you, the customer, into a scene. For example, when entering Abercrombe & Fitch the background of Alternative Rock is meant to carry you into a music video, and the background jazz playing at a Starbucks places you in one of the scenes of When Harry Met Sally.

Are we looking to escape? There could be some truth to that. It could explain why the iPod is carrying Apple to new heights. And why more and more people are strutting through most of their days with white earbuds in their ears.

We all just wanna be stars.

Scrobble Selected Only … ya right!

If you happen to visit my last.fm page, you will notice my second most listened to artist happens to be Fisher-Price Little People.

Yes, I have kids, and though the tunes are catchy, and got me through several traffic jams with my sanity in tact, I don’t want them to reflect my musical profile.

How did they end up nearly on top of my Top Artists List? Well Last.fm has a feature to not only scrobble songs listened to through iTunes, but even those listened to on your iPod. Every time you connect your iPod to your computer to sync and charge, the Last.fm app pops up and asks if you wish to scrobble the songs played on the iPod since the last time you connected. It also presents you with the list of the songs that were listened to, and asks if you wish to Scrobble All or Scrobble only the selected tracks. Despite deselecting the Fisher-Price Little People songs… as well as Celine and several other requests granted for my wife (no really), the application ends up scrobbling the full set!

Now I wonder whether my last.fm Recommendations station will reference singing purple dinosaurs.

I’ve since sent the issue to last.fm support and await a response (and hopefully a chance to adjust my list).