I’m the kind of person who likes to make things. For the web services I use, I like to think of ways to extend and play around with them, as an extension of me liking them. It’s sometimes a thankless task, as Jon Udell found out, but I do it anyways.

For del.icio.us, I’ve made LiveMarks, Kibbutz, and priv.at. (side note for people using priv.at – I am sorry but del.icio.us has wiped the over 10,000 bookmarks saved with this service for thousands of people. I am currently in email with them on restoring the service and the bookmarks)

I also digg digg, and although their API hasn’t given me as much as I think it could, I did manage to come up with a hack for that with a live digg this button.

OK so now my new obsession is last.fm. Last.fm is a great service that saves all of your tracks that you play and lets you tag them and talk about them with your friends, also offering some free tunes and a pay membership that includes more songs/radio stations.

But I do have serious problems with using last.fm. First of all, the free music play is way harder than it need be. Even the for pay music play is hard, because their access rights to the music are limited. Like everyone else, the idea of renting music sounds nice and all, but I kind of want to actually own it for good. And by the way iTunes, I don’t consider ‘you can copy the low bitrate tracks to a cd if you want, or make 3 copies’ to be owning music. I’m not a music sharecropper, I’m just not willing to be conned into DRM or music rental schemes – I demand real ownership.

But in this day and age, ownership is an increasingly rare commodity. Even last.fm itself isnt’ holding up its end of the deal. The problem is that while Last.fm will happily save all of your played tracks to its database, it will never let you have that information back. Last.fm locks in all of your play data and offers no way to get it back, beyond through paltry 10 track playlist rss feed. All the ideas I might have had about extending last.fm – making something that predicts up and coming music ala the Tag-digests or Livemarks blog, making a song tagging interface that isn’t completely terrible, all of those things are impossible with last.fm because they lock you in.

So in my spare time I’ve been working on a new open source project: a proxy for Last.fm. I will run a server that sits in between myself and last.fm, intercepting all communication and making a personal copy – with a real and simple API: an RSS feed where I can adjust the count to see all the tracks i’ve played. It’s a new project called musika. I recompiled the last.fm OSX iTunes plugin to point at my proxy script: http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/mfm/grabthar.php instead of post.audioscrobbler.com.

From now on, I own my music.

PS. On the Jon Udell point – NPR is absolutely ridiculous in demanding he take links to their podcasts out. I would think that a non-profit organization would avoid gratuitous legal threats considering the ill will it will engender among potential or current donors, I’m hoping they will issue an apology and allow Udell to continue offering his links to their podcasts.