Tagging Practices of Brazilian last.fm Users

Milwaukee.
The next speaker in this last.fm panel at AoIR 2009 is Adriana Amaral, who shifts our focus to Brazilian users of last.fm, and points especially to the role of online profiles here. Profiles are often related to a specific scene, subculture, or musical genre, and musical taste is a convergent process involving mass media, word of mouth, friends, community, family, and other social spaces. There are a number of site types here - classification, musical data visualisation, and online radio stations (based on listening data); each of these are important features of last.fm. The way the site deals with tagging intensifies the individual and collective relations of recommendations; its folksonomy can be understood as a narrow typology.

In Brazil the site is not as popular as elsewhere, and is populated mainly by heavy users who use the tool to promote their work. Tagging is used as much with collective as with personal intention. Most users (72%) prefer using the tags generated by the system; of those who do tag, 39% use two or three tags, 26% one or two, 24% three or more, and 11% only one tag. There are also 'masked tags' - patently playful tags, such as 'brutal death metal' for Paris Hilton's music - and symbolic definitional fights which highlight the disputed nature of classifications; 57% of users see this practice as polluting the system, but use it themselves to mock certain artists.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Brazil, genres, last.fm, music, recommendations, tagging
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, Brazil, genres, last.fm, music, recommendations, tagging