At the moment, Last.fm is not offering any kind of artist disambiguation and there is one single artist page for all the bands sharing the same name.
For instance, the following two albuns actually belong to two different artists:
The aim of this project is to automatically disambiguate bands by creating clusters of tracks by using the tracks' tags as attributes. In the example above, most of the tracks for the first album are tagged with words like "chillout", "mood", "ambient" while the tracks of the second album include tags like "indie", "pop", "french".
Obviously, for this method to work, we must assume that two artist with the same name will play different music genres.
- A Python webservice that computes track clusters using SciPy
- Chrome user script that modifies the layout of last.fm's artist pages showing track clusters.
This proof of concept is released under the GPL license and was developed as part of a Yahoo! Hack U event: http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/