I stumbled upon the lovely Soundcloud API this weekend, and before I knew it I was hacking together something that would use the LastFM API to lookup artists that I listen to, and then look to see if they are on Soundcloud. If you haven’t seen it before Soundcloud is a social networking site for musicians and audiophiles to share tracks. Sometimes artists will share works in progress, which is really fascinating.

It’s kind of amazing what you can accomplish in just HTML and JavaScript these days. It sure makes it easy to deploy, which I did at http://inkdroid.org/lastcloud/. If you want to give it a try enter your LastFM username, or the username of someone you know, like mine: inkdroid. As you can see the hack sorta worked. I say sorta because there seem to be a fair amount of users who are squatting on names of musicians. There also seem to be accounts that are run by fans, pretending to be the artist. Below is a list of seemingly legit Soundcloud accounts I found, and have followed. If you have any ideas for improving the hack, I put the code up on GitHub.