My scrobling counter on Last.fm just ticked past 30 000 this weekend, and the lucky track (among those recorded by Last.fm), was La Roux with Bulletproof. The song is one of my favourites on the self titled debut album from La Roux.

Are you on Last.fm? Make sure to add me It’s a great way to discover new music!

Tomorrow is the first day of the Hove Festival, at Hove just outside of Arendal. The previous years I have only had day passes for one or two days, but this year I will be there all four days! I’ve managed to steal the house from my parents, who are living in Arendal and will enjoy the comfort there – I am not really much of a camping person, hence we’re not bringing a tent with us for our Europe trip either!

So, tomorrow I am heading to Arendal and Hove for the first concert at 16:30. This year’s big must-see (and hear!) on my part is The Killers on Tuesday. There are lots of great bands this year, though, so I won’t have any problem filling the days with great music. On my top list are:

• Montée
• White Lies
• Franz Ferdinand
• Hockey
• Ratatat
• Casiokids
• Little Boots
• Faith No More
• M83
• Prodigy

Looking forward to my first week of vacation this year – spending it in the sun drinking beer and listening to music Then it’s back to one week of work before Aleksander and I head off to France, Spain and Italy for four weeks.

Following up on Aleksander’s encouragement earlier today, here is my music taste over the last 3 months Good mix of almost everything in there!

I’m into indie, rock, electronic, pop and female vocalists, including:
Röyksopp, Schiller, Carolina Liar, The Killers, Ratatat, U2, Kent, Empire of the Sun, Lily Allen, Sharon den Adel, Ladyhawke, La Roux, Paul van Dyk, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a-ha, Air Traffic, The Duke Spirit, Cut Copy, Paramore, Nightwish, Hard-Fi, Foo Fighters, Snow Patrol, Mr. Mister, KT Tunstall, Nelly Furtado, Iglu & Hartly, Donkeyboy, Adele, Amy Macdonald, James Morrison, Kate Ryan, Kleerup, Sophia Somajo, Rihanna, A Flock of Seagulls, Flight of the Conchords, Razorlight, The Pigeon Detectives, Kings of Leon, The Presets, Keane, Ellie Goulding, Evanescence, Knut Avenstroup Haugen, Garbage, The Sounds, Paul Oakenfold, Peter Buffett, Passion Pit.

Check out my music taste: http://www.last.fm/user/lastkarbo

What’s your taste? To Paste Your Taste, go to your Last.fm profile, go the list of “Top Artists” on your profile. Choose “Last 3 months”, then click the link titled “Paste Your Taste”. Copy and paste the text to your blog.

With all the sources for music we have today, one thing has struck me: The hassle of playing the music you want – when you are never able to find everything you want in one place.

As you know, I am using Spotify for most of my musical experience these days. However, there are a few songs which I miss on there. Some of them I have purchased and are available in Songbird, some others are only available on YouTube. In this Web 2.0, iEverything and whatnot-age, would it not be sweet with all these things integrated – in The Seamless Music Experience? Imagine a lightweight application, a simple playlist with a play/pause, forward and back button where you could drag & drop media from applications and websites and play them off as if they were all in the same application.

The Seamless Music Experience

If I had the time I would go ahead and develop it – the ultimate media player – but unfortunately I am bound by the space-time continuum as the rest of you (most of you).

Well – the idea is out there, if you want to implement it, go ahead. Implement some proprietary product with an “i” in front and I’ll sue the living crap out of you. Open Source it and help save the world… of music!

Following Aleksander’s example I thought I would post my music charts for 2008. These charts have been recorded by Last.fm and  does not include tracks played on my iPod and some quite heavy use of Spotify without scrobbling during December. However, the charts should give a fairly accurate picture of what was hot on my playlists during 2008

Top 10 artists

1. Coldplay (310)
2. Keane (228)
3. The Kooks (202)
4. Thirteen Senses (199)
5. Within Temptation (175)
6. Amy MacDonald (165)
7. The Killers (155)
8. Kent (144)
9. Nightwish (135)
10. The Cardigans (120)

Top 10 tracks

1. Sex On Fire – Kings of Leon (49)
2. Wire To Wire – Razorlight (47)
3. Violent and Young – Iglu & Hartly (45)
4. All the Love In Your Hands – Thirteen Senses (45)
5. Ooh La – The Kooks (44)
6. Call Someone – Thirteen Senses (43)
7. Human – The Killers (40)
8. Contact – Thirteen Senses (39)
9. Generation Ex – Kent (35)
10. Nothing In My Way – Keane (35)

Top 10 albums

1. Contact – Thirteen Senses (156)
2. Perfect Symmetry – Keane (104)
3. Inside In Inside Out – The Kooks (101)
4. Konk – The Kooks (95)
5. Best Of – The Cardigans (88)
6. X&Y – Coldplay (83)
7. The World is Outside – Ghosts (77)
8. Black Symphony – Within Temptation And The Metropole Orchestra (74)
9. Under The Iron Sea – Keane (72)
10. Slipway Fires – Razorlight (60)

That’s it! What’s your top 10?

The news of a new version of Spotify just came down the wire, and this new version is Scrobbling!

The ability to scrobble what you play to Last.fm has been one of the most requested items over the last couple of weeks and it’s great to see that the developers are listening to the community and fanbase that is starting to build around the application.

For those of you unfamiliar with Spotify; it’s a music service where you install an iTunes-, or Songbird-, like application on your computer and access music from the huge repositories of owned by several of the largest record companies. The downside is that you do not get to copy the music to your devices, but it’s one hell of a service for listening to music on your computer!

I got an invite (the service is still in closed Beta) a couple of weeks back and I have been using it constantly since that. It even runs on Linux with Wine, which is great. A few glitches here and there – the most annoying one being that the playback keeps stopping now and then and you have to restart the app. Once they fix that, and the app is out of Beta, I will be surprised if I don’t pay up those 99 NOK per month for ad-free music and the ability to share lists with friends.

I am sure Spotify will be at the top of Best Application of 2009 – it’s definitively one of the best things that has happened to music for years.