As listeners will know, for the last two months we’ve been experimenting with CFUR in the Summer, a music mix that deemphasizes the role of individual DJs in favour of playing more music. It’s been pretty successful so far, with one major problem– when there’s not an on-air host, there’s no way for listeners to tell what songs they’re actually hearing.
Well, we think we may have come up with a workable solution: last.fm. The social media savvy among you will have come across this site at some point, for the rest of you here’s the gist: last.fm is a network that allows users to share this message: “What am I listening to?” It does this by way of scrobbles (essentially sending the names of tracks you listen to in iTunes, WinAmp, and various other places) to your personal profile in last.fm. From there you can do various other things with the information (see here for more), but our purposes that’s good enough.
We’ve set up a last.fm account for CFUR Radio that is set up to scrobble tracks played during the CFUR music flows (Monday to Wednesday, 1 to 4). Now, if you hear a song you want to know more about, you should be able to go to last.fm/user/cfurradio and see what’s playing.
Oh, and if you happen to be a last.fm user who wants to scrobble the songs you hear on CFUR, here’s a nifty little tool you can use.
Let us know what you think about this feature, and also let us know if there’s anywhere else you think we should be in the world of online music.
