In the age of information, music sales may be down, but interest in music is up. Through research, blogs and iTunes listeners can find new bands and have music in their hands in no time.
But not everyone has time for this.
Thankfully, one of the latest social music crazes, Last.fm, hunts down new music for you according to your taste. What do you have to do? Just listen to the music you love.
Last.fm revolves around the Last.fm client, or “scrobbler.” After registering for an account and downloading the scrobbler, a user can begin making their profile by either listening to the internet radio station, or listening to their own songs through iTunes.
By clicking on the “Tune In” tab on the scrobbler, a user can begin finding a radio station. By typing in virtually anything: a musical genre, musical group or even a mood that music puts you in, Last.fm will find a song that best matches your search. From here, you can ban songs that you don’t like, or switch radios again and narrow down what you’re looking for.
Otherwise, it’s always cool just to play your own stuff rather than trying out various radio stations.
In 2002, Last.fm, was founded by Austrian and German natives Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, Michael Breidenbruecker and Thomas Willomitzer. Originally, running parallel with Last.fm was Audioscrobbler, a site with similar goals of logging the music of users and creating profiles from that information. In 2003, both of the projects were merged into one.
There are other similar existing programs that have this “reading your musical mind” technology. One of the most popular is Pandora, which finds music that sounds like a chosen song or artist, but is not able to look through musical genres alone. Like Ruckus, Pandora’s software has a software has a memory system that allows you to choose which songs or artists you like and then, remembers not to play what you dislike. And, unlike Last.fm, Pandora is free. However, with all this technology, Last.fm goes far beyond Pandora.
Every week, a new set of recommendations is given to a user based on what they listened to that week. Once you receive that list of recommendations, you can check out each artists Last.fm page.
Each page has three to four 30-second preview clips of the artist’s most popular songs. It also has the most listened to music of that artist for the last week and the last six months. Not to mention, even more recommendations on similar sounding artists.
After scrobbling 1,000 tracks, Last.fm will give you a set of neighbors. That is, people who listen to similar music based on what’s on your chart.
There is also a friend system, allowing users to “friend” each other and send music recommendations back and forth.
There is a lot to Last.fm, and this may sound overwhelming.
Through groups, friends, radio and one’s own charts there is a universe of music just waiting to be explored.
Despite the big let down of not being able to download all of this new music for free, Last.fm is worth investigating. When you’ve hit a rough patch in your music-listening career and need something fresh, there is no better place to turn.
Last.fm isn’t designed for just the indie kids, rap fans or any other specific fan base. It’s designed for everyone to take advantage of. So why not do just that?
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