Last.fm is basically a customizable internet radio station, with some social networking stuff tagged onto it. I don’t really use the social networking stuff, because I’m the only person I know in real life who uses it. The site works by letting you enter an artist or tag/keyword for the kind of music you want to listen to. If you enter an artist it will find music that people who like that artist like. If you enter a tag it just grabs whatever music has been slapped with that tag. Eitherway, it will stream CD quality music at you.
This is particularly appealing to me, because this is basically how I listen to music. I tend to listen to music in phases, I will spend a few weeks listening to a certain genre, and then just switch for a few weeks. You can see if you go to my last.fm profile. Last.fm supports this flip flopping pretty well. Being able to do this easily without manually creating playlists is a must have for me now. This is why I switched from Winamp to iTunes in fact, the Genius playlist generator in iTunes is the only way I listen to music unless I have just gotten a new album and want to listen to it at least once start to finish.
I also have a tendency to fall into musical ruts. I will listen to the same seven or eight albums over and over and over again. The albums occasionally shift around, but there have been literally years where the songs in my mp3 player haven’t changed at all. At first I assumed it was because no good new music was coming out. That, as it turns out, was total bullshit. I just didn’t know where to look. Last.fm helps solve that problem. While it is still very easy to fall int a rut with it, constantly starting up the same stations with the same artists and tags, it also makes discovering new music fairly trivial. Basically, if I hear anyone say “I really like <band name here>” I will plug it into last.fm and give their station a listen. I have ended up discovering a lot of new music I really like this way, with almost zero effort.
A side effect of my recent addiction to last.fm is that it has re-kindled my desire for a smartphone. Last.fm is basically the killer smartphone app for me. Whichever smartphone I end up getting, whichever plan I end up choosing, is more or less based around whether I will be able to listen to last.fm whenever I want wherever I want. So hot! Unfortunately the iPhone last.fm app has the pretty severe limitation of not letting you do anything else while you’re streaming. This is of course due to the fact that the iPhone is incapable of running background tasks. That’s a pretty major downside, and it’s not an issue on Android phones.
Anyway, if you like music a lot, and you find yourself having a hard time finding new stuff, I suggest you check it out. Unfortunately last.fm recently started charging Canadians $3USD a month. I broke down and paid it and I haven’t regretted it.
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