Marrying The Hype Machine with Last.fm

The time has come for online music's next big match made in heaven, marrying The Hype Machine with Last.fm.

I've posted about a Web2.0 mashup last December, thinking about combining Last.fm and Flickr, and we're now seeing those results thanks to Snapp Radio and  Tangerine (which analyzes beats per minute, BPM, to create playlists but you could imagine how BPM could be correlated to photographs that have been classified by their type of action or mood).

  Last.fm and The Hype Machine 
  Originally uploaded by cherbert.

So why is now the time to combine The Hype Machine with Last.fm?

The easy answer is that I've come to love both services so that I can't live without them. Right now, though, I'm living with them seperately as each app plays alone in its own little data-silo sandbox.

More importantly, I think they've both reached critical mass and I can't be the only one who would love to see their Hype Machine listening habits integrated with Last.fm. Last (no pun intended), unifying these great web apps would benefit both companies and increase the popularity of both services as well.

I know that Last.fm has API features but I'm not sure about The Hype Machine but I think its founder, a 20 year-old Russian immigrant could make it work. He sounds like a smart kid.

I'm listening to so much music via The Hype Machine during the day, especially when checking out new artists because you get full versions on the songs to test out, that I'm missing all of the those "plays" on my Last.fm dashboard. This is usually updated via the Scrobbler plugin for iTunes. At home when using iTunes, all of the new music or podcasts that I've downloaded are being recorded and tracked at Last.fm but my workday musical tastes are being lost.

I've been using mp3s ever since the Fall of 1998 when i started college, back in the heyday of Napster. I downloaded Winamp and began amassing a huge mp3 collection because I could, finding and then downloading any music that you wanted was just a click away but more importantly, the college dorm was the ultimate environment for music discovery.

Besides forging new friendships, the dorm fosters the sharing (or the overhearing of roommates and neighbors) musical tastes and that's when I first began really listening to new music.

Well I've long since ditched Winamp (it still does whoop the llama's ass) for iTunes and my musical discovery tools have gone Web2.0 so I want to combine my more active listening habits via The Hype Machine with Last.fm's social networking and listening analytics.