Ayo Technology! (or: King Fiddy Meets Remixers Uptown)

Happy new year to you! A little bit of a delay there, but y'know, that's how i like to roll. Hope y'alls Festivus & New Year period was adequately celebratory.

Anyway, Life Just Bounces begins its 2009 with an interesting little piece of code shenanigans over at the last.fm site, your familiar one-stop shop for all things musically streamable and chart-based. If you're one of the many last.fm users who uploads their own music to the site, you'll know of their Music Manager feature, the "control panel" that lets you add albums and tracks, change titles round, set priority for your "on-demand" tracks (cf. the MySpace player, etc.) that represent your stuff to the world. It's this latter feature that we focus on here.

The interface allows you to upload tracks for any artist — which includes existing artists. You can obviously choose to label these how you wish, but the option to list them under the original artist's name is available. This was the case recently when i uploaded 30KB's melding of 50 Cent's "I Get Money" with Big Pete Gabriel's "Sledgehammer".

Now, another feature of the Music Manager is the ability to select and order your "on-demand" tracks, the four that will appear in the Music Player at the top-right of each artist page to showcase your œuvre to the world. What i didn't realise before was that uploading a track under a given artist name gives the uploader the ability to rearrange or even replace the said tracks.

Which is how the 30KB mix of "I Got Money" ended up in 50 Cent's music player.


Not sure if this is an intentional feature, but it's certainly jolly decent of last.fm to enable upcoming remixers to display their talents in this way. i eagerly await the overwhelming torrent of praise the mix will surely garner from Fiddy's 605,414 listeners.