Music Discoveries, bad and good: the Grammys and last.fm

Sunday Elke and I watched the Grammys for the first time and for me it was a pretty big turn off. I've never really believed in the idea of handing out awards for music, because it's nearly impossible to judge the quality of music detached from the individual taste. The Oscars work, because it is possible to assess the technical quality of acting, directing or screen writing independently of commercial success. At the Grammys, however, commercial success and nominations are absolutely aligned.
But here's what annoyed me the most: I believe that music is something greater than the people who perform it. The Grammys, however, completely center around the performers. This became very evident when the show wildly paired musicians in a seemingly desperate bid to create musical history ("together on stage for the first time ever!"). So we had to endure Chris Martin & Jay-Z (simply odd), Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus (pretty, but meaningless), the four biggest rapper-egomaniacs (together on stage together for the first time ever! With a scarily pregnant M.I.A) and Paul McCartney and David Grohl on the drums (untypically the camera circled again and again around the drummer: it's David Grohl. Really. On the drums!). Many performances weren't actually bad, but were overpowering the music by focusing on visual spectacle: for example Radiohead performed with a marching band, kind of cool, but odd and unfitting for a band as artistic as Radiohead.

In the end I was almost done with music - if it was not for last.fm, which I finally signed up a couple of hours earlier. I really enjoyed the listening stats it generated out of my iTunes library (my top 3 bands are Björk, Radiohead and U2 - which came somewhat as a surprise). And now I'm listening to the recommendation channnel, which has an almost 100% hit rate (which should be possible to achieve by analyzing 55,000 songs I listened to since 2004).
So here we go: the past of music with the Grammys, which try to broadcast the same pop music mix to as many people as possible and the future, where everybody gets exactly served what she or he likes.