Awesome Website of the Week: Last.fm
Posted on March 31, 2007
I love music. Let it be known. My iTunes library is several dozen gigabytes. My CD collection numbers a few hundred. And on top of that I have a couple of boxes of vinyl albums. That’s why I really like Last.fm. This is a website that has one basic idea, sharing music (but not in the Kazaa Gnutella kind of way), but it really does so much.
The first thing it does is track your music. Pretty much every audio player under the sun is supported (I use iTunes), and a little background app quietly submits that information to Last.fm. Last.fm then takes that information and parses it into charts tracking top artists, songs, albums, everything else. It can then recommend to you stuff that you might like. There are songs for free download, with no DRM. There’s a radio app that lets you listen to just about every artist available. There’s a wiki-type system for each artist, for bios, pictures, tagging, etc.
There’s the social aspect too. You can befriend people, recommend music too them, discuss on forums, track other people, all sorts of stuff. Last.fm shows you your “musical neighbourhood”, people who, based on their listening habits, have the same tastes as you. There’s a quilt thingie, similar to the flash-based Flickr badge but with album covers. And there’s the chart publishing tool, like what’s in the sidebar there.
There’s a lot to explore and find on Last.fm, and it’s a cool way to find music, negating the argument that mp3 players are killing people’s ability to discover new music. It might not change your life, but it’s a fun site to use. And if you do sign up, be sure to add me.
Filed Under AWotW, Hurray!, King of Internets, Music | 2 Comments
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Hey you know a few weeks ago I downloaded the application but I couldnt get it to work, at least on my work computer. It sounds cool and everything too. I will try it again when I purchase a new computer (hopefully soon).
For me, I just tend to like a few internet stations. Radio Paradise is my favorite. I have supported them as well. But the way things are going, we may not even have internet radio stations in a while!
Yeah there really is a whole lot of foolishness going on with the government and internet music type stuff. I tend to listen to my own music collection more often than not, but iTunes does have a good selection of stations. I like Bootstrap Liquor or whatever it’s called for when I’m in one of my wierd old-timey country moods, and Shirley & Spinoza when I’m in a just plain weird mood. And I poke around some of the European stations every now and then, but most of them just seem to be hackneyed dance music.