Last.fm

I introduced Tamara to Last.fm this week, and she suggested that I do a blog post explaining it and some of the reasons that we think it's an intriguing service.

What is Last.fm

I'm going to take the easy way out and let Last.fm describe itself:

Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you.

You can use Last.fm to listen to music, find out about artists you may like, other people with similar music taste, gigs in your local area, charts and quilts for your personal site, as well as much more.

So what does that mean?

Think of Last.fm as a sort of "Facebook for Music". As a matter of fact, Last.fm actually pre-dates Facebook by a couple of years, so maybe Facebook is the Last.fm of personal relationships. Whatever. The point is that Last.fm adds a social aspect to your music.

Scrobbling? (or: how it works)

I think the Last.fm folks made up this word, so I'd better let them describe it again.

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

Once you've signed up and downloaded Last.fm, you can scrobble songs you listen to on your computer or iPod automatically. Start scrobbling yourself, and see what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see.

Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.

Put it all together for me

So, you download the "audio scrobbler" software from Last.fm and start listening to your music in iTunes as you always do (also supports Windows Media Player and Winamp, but that just begs the question: why aren't you using iTunes?). Last.fm has all this information about what you are listening to, so now what can you do with it?

Here's the summary as I see it:

• Track trends of what you listen to (sounds boring, but to a stats nerd like myself, it's actually fascinating)
• Find friends on Last.fm and see what they're listening to; see your musical compatibility based on commonly played artists (Tamara and I, unsurprisingly, have a high musical compatibility).
• Share your musical trends and tastes. For example, here's my chart for last week:
  

  
  

• Share music. One way to do this is to embed a music player in a web page or blog post:
  Matty Schroeder – Choke
• Discover new music. This is probably the best part about Last.fm. Through the Last.fm software, you can listen to radio stations that are customized for you based on artists that are similar to the ones you already have in your playlist. Also, just viewing your dashboard page will show artists you may be interested in (this just revealed to me that Tyler Burkum has released his first solo album)
• You can join groups. Yay. It's a feature I largely ignore on Facebook, and entirely ignore on Last.fm, so it doesn't fit well into my sales pitch.


• Events and concert listings are associated with artists, so you can easily follow the acts that are coming to your neighbourhood. Can't say that I've really used this feature much yet either, but I can see the utility in it.

If you're not already using Last.fm, give it a try. If you are using Last.fm, add us as friends:
Josh is jdschroeder and Tamara is Tamschro.