Social music service Blip.fm just added a new feature. Like Foursquare and other services, users now earn ‘badges’ for activity on the site. They aren’t applied retroactively though; I had to blip at least one track to make sure they were working. Interestingly, quite a few badges are earned through the actions of others: people reblipping your tracks and giving props. Some appear very hard to earn: ‘Top 10’ for ranking in the top 10 most listened to DJs in a month. A few of the badges also feature levels. Level 1 seems pretty easy but level 3 looks impossible. It’ll be interesting to see how these play out and I like how the game is structured (direct and indirect badges).

I like using Blip when I want to share a single track on Twitter (which I had been using Songza for). I’ve never really used it as a starting point to discover music. Unfortunately, Blip’s reliance on outside sources for music makes link-rot (blip-rot?) in playlists extremely high which is always disappointing when I review my old shares. You can find my profile on Blip here.