I fire up Last.fm to play some tunes and I notice this intriguing Epson ad. The ad wanted to know my username to generate an image of my listening activity. I’m a member of the Last.fm Stats Group so I’m familiar with this idea of rendering pretty charts of listening activity. I typed my username, this is what came up:

I cropped off October to fit the image here. Well, they targeted me pretty well, but once the image rendered I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no navigation, no explanation why Epson wanted me to see this. And why only September and October? I saved the image, closed the tab.

Now I was back to Last.fm and the ad had changed. Now I had an option to print my pretty graph, but this is where Epson somewhat lost me. Just to clarify, the image they showed me was 1200px wide. Would I print it? A simple yes/no decision, finalized in the blink of an eye, but actually too complicated to explain here. Let’s just say my Epson inkjet back in the 90s printed a lot of art at 1200dpi and I took full advantage of every pixel. But these days my art is printed professionally at a print shop.

Once back at Last.fm I proceeded to Epsonality.com, Epson’s Flash site which gave me personality sliders (such as Home vs. Business) to conjure up my (supposedly) ideal printer. After all, they know me so well by now, right? The printer Epsonality.com came up with cost $70. Nice looking, sleek and black. But I’d never buy an inkjet. Because the ink is expensive and the nozzles clog. Believe it or not, I’m the proud owner of a thermal printer that doesn’t need any ink. And I have a laser printer.

But back to the image. How was it created? I did some digging, the service is called LastGraph. It will even generate PDF posters from your Last.fm listening history.