last.fm feeds for BBC Radio

Our last.fm feeds are finally official (you can read about the previous incarnations of the feeds here and here). This means that almost all the tracks that BBC Radio plays are sent/scrobbled to last.fm. That's not quite everything we play (it doesn't cover live sessions, vinyl or some overnight shows) but it's the majority of 6Music and daytime Radio 1, Radio 2 and 1Xtra (sorry, still no Radio 3). So on the last.fm profile pages (below) you can see what the stations have just played, top tracks for the week etc. The current feeds are...

BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 2
BBC 1Xtra
BBC 6Music
Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1
Steve Lamacq on BBC 6Music
Ace and Vis on BBC 1Xtra

Nothing particularly hard here, just some business stuff and Patrick, one of our SEs is currently rewriting my code to make it 100% reliable. And thanks to last.fm for doing some database magic that renamed our "sekrit" feeds.

You'll notice there are some DJs/shows as well, hopefully there will be more soon. The radio networks have started to think about what they could do with these feeds and have some interesting ideas. 1Xtra have already put a recently played widget on their playlist page and there should be some more stuff soon.

Update: User's comment on their compatibility with the Steve Lamacq profile:

"'Very High' YES! *smug*
andrewjackson shouted yesterday afternoon"

This is why we're doing it.

Listening to the DJs

Do any DJs use iTunes, last.fm or similar services to listen to music, outside their broadcast shows? Some of them must do. Or is everything they listen to unreleased white label 12"s? Anyway, wouldn't it be a great service if you could "tune" into what they are listening to right now? I suppose it would be extending their show outside its current temporal boundaries. It could be timeshifted as well, doesn't have to be live.

I was thinking about this as I've been listening to songs through iTunes and last.fm all day and somebody else should be able to tune into what I've listened to. OK, so no-one is very likely to want to do such a thing for my listening (well, unless you're a fan of classic 60s Impulse, new UK jazz, instrumental hip-hop and Gilles Peterson, in which case I've got excellent taste), but they might for a DJ or a record producer.

Does anything do this already? I know last.fm is close - it shows you what people are playing, and plays a stream of random music from other their profiles. But it doesn't do a stream of what they've just listened to, rights problems I guess.

John Coltrane

John Coltrane died 40 years ago today. The finest modern jazz musician the world has ever seen.

The Guardian has thoughts from some musicians.

MusicBrainz at the BBC

Tom writes about the upgrade to www.bbc.co.uk/music that now uses MusicBrainz IDs for artists, albums and tracks. Plus the album reviews are now under a Creative Commons license and are microformatted with hReview and hCard. Read his post to find out why this is so important and how it will expand the potential of this information.

Michael's obviously been a busy man - what with this and the prototype clickable tracklistings for Hackday.

Update: More info up on the MusicBrainz site