How come I didn’t know about this extremely cool website before? I am talking about Last.fm. Last.fm is an social music platform. Using a music recommendation system known as “Audioscrobbler“, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user’s computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (“scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favorites.
This thing is seriously cool. Not only do I get to stream music that I really like but have never heard of, but I also get to find out about new music by finding out about the preferences of friends or people I admire. For instance, you can list to author Neil Gaiman’s station here. Or mine, that I am still building, here.
Very cool stuff especially since it can look at the history of what you played in iTunes or on your iPod. Also, I have been running it and monitoring the behavior. It really doesn’t seem to take a huge amount of bandwidth in streaming mode, so it really doesn’t slow everything else down when it runs. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I have no vested interest, and no affiliate link, I would just like to know your opinion!