Last FM

I love this!! Been around for a while, but only started listening recently. Awesome stuff

Last.fm is coooool!!!!

Last.fm has become such a part of my music listening experience that I don’t use music playing software unless it has last.fm support. However, I don’t believe that it is quite the social music revolution that it wants to be, nor do I think it ever will be.

What is it?
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Last.fm, which was created way back in 2002, is multiple things:

First and foremost, it is a tool to record your listening habits. Users create a profile, download a small plugin and then just sit back and listen to whatever they want to listen to. This plugin is available for everything from itunes to spotify and essentially what it does is it records what you listen to and creates charts using this information. Using this you can over the months and years see what artist you listen to most or what song was your favourite. There are possibilities to divide this up further into charts by week or month and further suss out what your listening habits are. You can then generate code for these charts and paste them on everything from your website to your signature on an internet forum.

Secondly, and closely related to this, last.fm is a music-based social networking site. Users have the ability to create and join groups with others of similar interests and musical tastes. The way in which this is closely related to chart creation is that group charts are created. Similarly, there are also global charts created. To prevent these being influenced they are based upon number of people listening to a particular artist or song and not each individual listen. This is interesting in that it provides somewhat different charts from the usual top40 because it is based on listens rather than purchases, albeit on a global scale.
If anything, this is the weakest part of the site; very few people actively participate in the groups and other social networking aspects of last.fm, and I can’t help help but thinking that the company tag ‘the social music revolution’ is a bit misleading.

Finally, last.fm is a way to discover new music. Based upon your listening habits, last.fm generates a personal radio station that plays your most listened songs. The BEST feature of this is that it also recommends new artists and tracks to you.

The most powerful aspect of last.fm is, in my opinion, its compatibility with the iphone and ipod touch. Users can download a small app that does exactly the same as the computer software. Rather amazingly, it records what you listen to on your ipod and when you next connect it to your computer these results are ‘scrobbled’ and incorporated into your charts. The best feature of the app is by far the radio feature which like it’s computer counterpart is able to suggest new artists and songs for you. This allows you to listen to music beyond that on your ipod or iphone. The feature that makes this app great is that you have the option to, at the press of a button, proceed to itunes and buy the track for yourself.

Last Fm is a music streaming website which offers a whole new aspect in the way of its social parts. Last Fm like others such as deezer lets you play music once you have created an account. Its selection is not bad however I have found it to be fairly inferior to that of Spotify’s.

As for the social aspect of Last Fm, you can easily create playlists which are then held on your profile page which others can look at. In the same vein you can look at other people’s playlists which is good if you are stuck for what to play. You can also integrate last fm into all sorts of things such as a forum signature so that people can see what the last n songs were that you played.

Unfortunately I have never really got into this social aspect of Last Fm and thus for me it is not that great since as a music streaming site I think it is easily beaten by Spotify. If the social aspect sounds good for you then definitely give this site a go.

For those of you who do not know, last.fm is a social networking site dedicated to music. Basically, last.fm finds out what music you listen to by scrobbling (a posh term for keeping track of your plays on iTunes, your iPod, Windows Media etc.) it to your last.fm profile. From this, it is able to recommend new artists, events and songs to you, as well as showing you the artists and tracks that you listen to most of all. You can also connect with existing friends to see what they like to listen to in real time, as well as making new friends through last.fm’s service of connecting you with users with similar musical tastes to you. Finally, and perhaps best of all, the radio feature plays new music to you based on a particular artist or genre of music that you selected.
Last.fm is only really useful if you listen to a fair amount of music, otherwise you won’t listen to enough songs to give last.fm the information it requires to do recommendations. However, if you do listen to a lot of music, you will probably find it a useful, entertaining and informative service.

My favourite feature that last.fm has are probably the recommended bands that last.fm gives. It gives endless opportunities to discover new music and to directly start to listen to songs! You can mark your favourites, find pictures, videos and the bands bio! The event section gives another great support to music lovers and I use it a lot! :) I also think that the last.fm radio stations are very smart and even if I do not like a song it is easy to skip it and go on with greatness that suits my preferences! :)

Being a bit of an obsessive music fan I got very excited when a friend (a particularly emotional fellow known as @gleeding) explained what last.fm was and how it worked, suffice to say that I jumped straight onto the site as soon as I was by a computer…..and what a treat it was!!!!

The artist profiles, gig listings, social networking functions are all very good but for me it is all about the 'Listen’ function which recommends new music to users by analysing their music library. After a few goes I searched for artists similar to Kings of Convenience and in return I got 2 hrs of incredible songs which i’d never heard before.

Truly fantastic!

Last.FM is certainly a useful service if you’re the type that likes to listen to different music over time. When it first came out, it was one of the few pioneers. These days, you see everyone trying to come up with something similar.

Based on your music preferences (you can use a plugin to link it to your media player and let it upload the tracks you listen to Last.FM automatically, or you can just state your preferences), the service provides recommendations to you.

At the same time, you can create radio stations out of songs you like, artists you like or even just the genre. Whatever your style, I’d say that there is something for every music lover at Last.FM.

I have only recently signed up to Last FM. I’m not sure why it has taken me so long. Maybe I needed to get fed up with my current playlists before I found something new. As it is, Last FM has set me up with plenty of new artists and some great individual tracks. I wouldn’t say my musical tastes are limited or narrow, but I know what I like, and Last FM really helps to search out new bands / singers that offer something new and in places that I would never have though of looking.

I can’t afford to be buying CDs at a whim, so it’s good to be able to make a decision using this service beforehand. Definitely worth signing up!

Listen Share Discover. There's so much music I listen to that I owe to Last.fm recommendations...

These guys were given a tour around the Last.fm office:

A great service for tracking your music listening habits and finding new music you might like based on that data. It doesn’t have the flexibility of say, Pandora, but the social aspect is really great.

Fantastic service which logs what I listen to and suggests new music to me.

It records my listening habits via iTunes and my iPhone.

I can now listen to my own last.fm radio station via the new Last.fm app on my iPhone or stations created by any of my contacts.

A fantastic piece of social software and a great illustration of what can be achieved by networking online.

Brilliant service! Software plugs into your music player and monitors what you play on your computer and/or iPod, and recommends music that you might like.

There is a vast community of forums, radio stations, user groups and all manner of excellent stuff to enhance the Last.fm experience.

It’s worth paying a small subscription to get added functionality too.

I love Last.fm. It helps me find out information about my favourite artists, and recommends lots of brilliant artists for me to listen to, too! Lots of songs are available in full, and you can listen to them for at least 3 times before you decide whether to buy or not… Much better than the 30 second previews on iTunes!
Scrobbling has become one of my addictions. The only downside of Last.fm is that it shows the world how crap my music taste really is.
Their radio is tailored to your music tastes, and is pretty decent (although I did prefer Pandora before it went 'pfft’ on me). You can 'love’ or 'ban’ tracks from your radio, which is excellent. Last.fm have also released an iPhone/iPod Touch app, which means you can carry around Last.fm radio with you wherever you go!

Just discovered this and am very impressed so far. A chance to listen free to new music and, in an Amazon recommends sort of way, read reviews and check out other people’s play lists. There is also a running list that constantly updates itself with stuff you might like, based on what you’re listening to now. Amazon has always worked well for me in that way - often buy unknown authors or music and love them - and Last FM seems to be doing the same so far…

Great music website, which is useful for tracking what you’ve been listening to as well as discovering new music.

One of the best things about the site, especially compared to the horribly US centric ilike.com is that it has events for anywhere and everywhere. This is largely due to the community entries that it allows. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to have the big label or artists backing in the same way as ilike, but perhaps if word of mouth can get enough people to move to the superior service last.fm can come out on top.

Last.FM is now one of my favourite websites. The radio stations are very intelligent and the events concept is really cool (and used widely across Europe). With the death of Pandora.com, this is now my first port of call for music and to meet people who are into the same kind of stuff as me.