A PR who shall remain nameless but is involved in the digital music industry, remarked on my musical tastes (as shown at Last.FM) recently… apparently the Rogue Traders have a big gay following.

"At least", he quipped, "you're not listening to the soundtrack to Brokeback Mountain or something."

At that moment, my music stats refreshed, and what should come up as #1 … Brokeback Mountain soundtrack.

… well I'd just seen the movie and thought it had a great soundtrack!

When I put that "what I'm listening to" in the sidebar on the right hand side, I never thought for a moment about what it would show up about me (or appear to show up…!)

If someone asked me what music I liked, I'd tell them Powderfinger, Garbage, The Dandy Warhols, Bernard Fanning, Evermore. And it would be true… they're the bands I've recently bought albums from at the iTunes Music Store.

But the "what I'm listening to" list often shows up a different and embarrassing side of my musical tastes. For example: Johnny Logan … schmaltzy 80s … John Farnham … Aussie legend but nonetheless has his fair share of bogan K-Mart shoppers in his fan base … and Dance 93 Volume 2 … I'm not even going to begin to justify that except to say that "family of music" is a great song, OK.

I'm just glad that "Barbie's Pool Party Mix" hasn't shown up yet. Someone once looked through my iTunes collection and found that and paid me out for months.

The true story behind that was that I was once doing a corporate video for Coles Myer (in a past career that I prefer not to think about) and they wanted a song that apparently appealed to Barbie fans on it. The easiest way that I could get the CD into Final Cut Pro was to rip it using iTunes… and then I neglected to delete the embarrassing material from my hard drive. It has now been digitally shredded.