I have been using Last.fm since October 2004 and over time it has grown into my favourite website ever. Last.fm utilises a plugin that reports the songs that you listen to to a central database that gradually builds up a profile of your music tastes. The geniuses at Last.fm explain it better here:
Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler music engine. More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users "scrobble" their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world's largest social music platform.
Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.
My good friend Lloyd Gedye, Mail and Guardian journalist and chief blogger at Isolation.tv, wrote an article for the M&G about Last.fm that appeared in last week's edition and is reproduced here on his excellent blog. He quotes me in the article (thanks Lloyd!), and explains the features that make this an essential service for music junkies like myself.
Last.fm is also a glimpse into the future of music radio. I spend most of my day working on my PC and listening to my Last.fm friends' radio stations or to custom radio stations that I have built myself. No ads, no irritating "personality" DJ's, certainly no generic Billboard Hot100 tunes playing 8 or 10 times a day. Once wireless broadband becomes cheap and ubiquitous enough I will be listening to Last.fm or services like it in my car too. Traditional music radio stations will gradually lose more and more listeners and either switch to a local talk radio format or die.
I have "scrobbled" 21 798 tracks since October 2004 when I joined, and as a result Last.FM has built a very accurate profile of my music tastes and interests. I have met a whole bunch of Diesel Whores fans through the service too - its really cool when a kid from Brazil emails you through Last.fm to say he likes your music. Last.fm is free, but there is a $3/month subscription option that gives you more control over your radio stations and a totally ad-free service. I have been a subscriber since late 2005.
Every track that you listen to is a wiki and can be tagged. This has enabled Last.fm to build up an incredible database of user generated information about artists and songs. Check out this flattering profile of my band that a guy called TenRapid submitted.
I know this sounds like an advert, but last.fm is so good that I just had to write about it. Try it out - if you enjoy finding new music you won't be disappointed.
My Last.fm Profile - go on, add me as a friend.