xekrit music

Matt B has just written up his work ("Last.fm isn't just for humans" ) on feeding "now playing" information from BBC Radio stations into the social music listening site last.fm. You can see the results for BBC 6Music as the last.fm user "sekrit". It stopped working sometime at the end of last year because of some changes in our playout systems but having inherited this work I've just got it working again so you should be seeing new tracks again. Potential uses include tracking what the station is playing, getting stats on the frequency that artists are played, discovering similar artists and new music and more.

One of the additional features of last.fm for subscribed users is that you get your own personalised radio stream and I'm intrigued about the issues raised by sekrit's personalised radio stream. Is this 6Music? Is it another 6Music? Is 6Music just an aggregation of tracks played or is it more than that? Is it better to have 6Music without the DJs?

Also check out some of sekrit's family...

Update: Several people (here, here and a U2 fansite here) have pointed out that U2 are the most played band. I agree that it seems a bit unlikely.