Last.fm
January 15th, 2006
I’m always somewhat late in discovering new cool music sites. This is probably a sign of aging 
. Anyway, I discovered Last.fm a few days ago and it left me speechless, it’s what I was waiting for for a long time. Although the main idea is similar to Pandora’s (find out the music that you might like based on what you already like), Last.fm wraps this into a cool social aspect. It is based on a little cool app, the “Audioscrobbler” which sends information about the songs you’re listening in your player to Last.fm. This enables them to provide excellent statistics, like “The most popular Offspring’s song is Self Esteem” or “People who listen to Molotov also listen to Control Machete or Cafe Tacuba”. Now, this is really useful info since it is based on real user stats and it is just plain cool and it also really works - I discovered a few new excellent bands and found some fantastic songs of artists I already know, all in just couple of hours.
A weak point is that Audioscrobbler can’t run on my Creative Zen Nano (apparently they don’t support Creative at all) which is where I listen 90% of my music, so my stats are based only on the stuff I listen on my PC, which is not very accurate.
Last.fm also follows Web 2 trends, providing groups, tags, APIs and RSS feeds for many things such as the lately played tunes, top played artists (check my sidebar), and so on. The API and RSS are still in the works, so they are not yet perfect (the top artists are refreshed once a week). Oh, and it can stream a personalized radio station specially for you, based on the songs you listen to.
In brief, this is one of the coolest and most useful sites I’ve seen in a long time.
Tags: Last.fm, Pandora, Live 365
I absolutely love last.fm, formerly known as audioscrobbler, etc. I’m the same as you in that it can’t parse internet streams (including those from my own PC across the internet) and I rarely connect my iPod to my main computers anymore to get recently played data, but it’s still a good way to keep up with friends and what they’re listening to. I added a plug in to my sidebar to grab my recent tracks and I have been listening to more music at home, but it’s still not very accurate for me either.
(came here looking for wordpress tag plugins)
Comment by Brian — January 19th, 2006 @ 4:05 pm
[…] Broobles recently posted about Last.fm, a site that tracks your music listening habits, and recommends artists based on what you listen to. Here’s some of what he had to say. Anyway, I discovered Last.fm a few days ago and it left me speechless, it’s what I was waiting for for a long time. Although the main idea is similar to Pandora’s (find out the music that you might like based on what you already like), Last.fm wraps this into a cool social aspect. It is based on a little cool app, the “Audioscrobblerâ€? which sends information about the songs you’re listening in your player to Last.fm. This enables them to provide excellent statistics, like “The most popular Offspring’s song is Self Esteemâ€? or “People who listen to Molotov also listen to Control Machete or Cafe Tacubaâ€?. Now, this is really useful info since it is based on real user stats and it is just plain cool and it also really works - I discovered a few new excellent bands and found some fantastic songs of artists I already know, all in just couple of hours. […]
Pingback by /dev/urandom -- Pseudorandomness » The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Last.fm — January 22nd, 2006 @ 9:18 am