Thanks to Last.fm, I've spent the last few weeks "scrobbling" what I listen to. It's been fun, and rather interesting to look at the play lists of people who share similar music tastes to mine--new artists to be discovered, once I get past the fact that more than a few of my closest matches on the music "taste-o-meter" are 18-year-old girls.

I've already noticed one interesting side effect, though. I'll be the first to admit that I have one of those personalities that has an urge to find the unseen corners of anything, so I've been trawling the recesses of Last.fm, and my own memory banks, trying to come up with obscure bands and songs no one else has ever listened to much.

That means revisiting the music of my youth, and I have to admit I wasn't one of those cool kids who had a bunch of Dead Kennedys, Suicidal Tendencies and Sonic Youth albums tucked away at home. Not even The Ramones or the Clash, for that matter. (Well, I did have a couple of singles, but I wasn't a "fan".)

I did purchase music by the Psychedelic Furs and the B-52s, though. And I was an avid fan of all things Pink Floyd and The Doors, so I wasn't a hopeless case.

Still, I listened to a lot of pop and rock--you know, Journey, Styx, Night Ranger, that kind of thing. And, okay, some hair metal. Cinderella, Motley Crue, Poison...um, let's not that list get any longer.

But even then, a part of me tried to find the music that fell between the cracks, so I found myself listening to a lot of pop music that didn't catch on very much with other people. You see where I'm going. I decided to start searching the annals of Last.fm, seeing if I could be the one and only person who was a listener of some particular artist or song. And my rule was: it had to be an artist or song I really did listen to at some point in my past.

First off, I thought I'd go for some of the semi-obscure names that I was sure would have several listeners, but were still a bit under the radar.

Maybe you recognize the name Walter Egan. If not, if you're of a "certain age," you would certainly recognize his signature tune Magnet & Steel. A total of roughly 3,000 listeners, and 10,000 plays in Last.fm's database. Kind of what I expected, but my ace in the hole was Egan's comparatively little-known song Fool Moon Fire from his album Wild Exhibitions, which I listened to thousands of times on vinyl. I fared much better on this: only 15 scrobbles of Fool Moon Fire in Last.fm's archives. At most, that's 15 other people listening to the song. At least, it's one other person who has scrobbled the song 15 times. Someone out there remembers and loves one of only two songs about werewolves (along with Werewolves of London) to ever hit the Billboard charts. (I was also pleasantly surprised to discover Walter Egan has a free download of this very song on his website, and I've since scrobbled it several times. It's now up to 20 plays on Last.fm.)

Next up, I went for Michael Stanley Band, and their song He Can't Love You Like I Love You, another one played several thousand times during my youth. I was surprised to discover it has 545(!) plays on Last.fm, and I found out a new piece of trivia: this song was actually the 45th video ever played on MTV. I need to find some of those other MSB fans.

Okay, howzabout Donnie Iris? Ah, Leah, which dovetailed with my high school crush on a girl named Leah, was literally worn out from repeated plays. Evidently, a few other people had crushes on girls named Leah, because this song has more than 8,000 scrobbles on Last.fm. Okay, I didn't expect this song to be actually obscure, but it's nice to see Donnie Iris is doing all right. One user, owkenobi, even left a comment on the song: "This is the greatest song ever written. Of all time." I don't know that I could say that, but it's nice to find a fellow traveler; owkenobi's getting an instant friend invite from me.

Martin Briley. Let's go with Martin Briley. His first hit, The Salt in My Tears, brought him some considerable fame, but I was always more partial to the work on his album Dangerous Moments. Ha! My favorite track from the album, Underwater, has never been scrobbled on Last.fm. And it's likely to never be, since I don't think this album was ever released on disc or digitally, and my old vinyl version is long gone.

Time to pull out the most obscure pop band I listened to in my youth: The Innocents. They had only one album and no charted singles; I heard of them while watching TV one day, and discovering them in a documentary about the "making of a band." It's a shame they weren't bigger, because their music was rather more interesting than a lot of other stuff in their day; it was definitely pop, but had a bit of a new wave edge (I saw someone say it was "Devo pop," and I think that's a nice description. More on that in a moment.) To this day, I can still hear the songs on their one and only album (creatively titled The Innocents) floating through my head.

I hit it big time with this. Only one of their songs, Directly from the Heart, has been scrobbled on Last.fm; the entire rest of the album, including my faves Stop Shooting Up Stars and Twisted Kiss.

Curious, though, I decide to do google searches for this band, and these songs in particular. And it seems I wasn't the only child watching that TV on a Saturday afternoon long ago. I discovered blog entries, a MySpace fan page (with 99 friends!), copies of the album for sale, and more.

If the Internet is good for nothing else, it's good for finding that shared sense of community tied to the smallest things. "Hey, here are people who listened to The Innocents. My kinda peeps!"

Of course, now you know my next goal. I must find a band from my childhood that's not mentioned anywhere, by anyone, on the entire Internet.