What are the neighbours listening to?

A few weeks back I saw a post from aimaz which used Python to download and look at a lastfm's user's topartists.

Like many others I thought "cool", but primarily because it had never occurred to me that all that lastfm data might be available to me too. Doh !

So I went off and did a wee improvement on aimaz' idea. The script finds all topartists for a group of users, then finds how often each artist is played, and makes a league table out of that, showing most popular artist first, ...

One step further: if you only give one username, then the script makes the group of users from that user's neighbours (including the original user), so you get to see what your neighbours are your neighbours.

For me the top 20 are:
1 - The Clash (20)
2 - Pixies (18)
3 - The Beatles (17)
3 - Johnny Cash (17)
5 - Bob Dylan (16)
6 - The Cure (15)
7 - Tom Waits (14)
7 - David Bowie (14)
9 - Talking Heads (13)
9 - The Smiths (13)
9 - The Velvet Underground (13)
12 - Radiohead (12)
12 - The Rolling Stones (12)
14 - Nirvana (11)
14 - Elvis Presley (11)
14 - The White Stripes (11)
14 - Pink Floyd (11)
18 - R.E.M. (10)
18 - Joy Division (10)
18 - Neil Young (10)
18 - The Pogues (10)
18 - Ramones (10)
18 - The Doors (10)


Ahh ! That's why they are my neighbours! Although I can't trust them too much: Radiohead and R.E.M are in my personal Yuck-list. (Radiohead are near top of my Yuck-list)

But the original reason I joined last.fm - I want more music, stuff I don't know. ... All the way down at joint 45th: The Magnetic Fields, played by 5 of my neighbours. Have to see about giving them a try. I could get a lofi tracks from here.

Oh - you were just after the script ? Try here.