Last.fm is a social listening service for discovering and sharing music through the Last.fm site, your own blog and other social networks. Founded in 2002, it is now part of the CBS Interactive network of Web sites and is currently beta testing an unlimited music streaming service that delivers a personalized listening experience on PCs. The site makes extensive use of playlists to deliver widgets, like the one on the right, that describe members’ currently or recently listened-to music and streaming music sharing.

Getting started with Last.fm takes two steps, registering and downloading a “scrobbler” application that monitors the music you listen to on your PC and uploads song titles to Last.fm. With 78 scrobbler choices at this writing, we recommend choosing based on what is most deeply integrated with your music software, whether it is iTunes, Windows Media Player or one of the many choices.

Once you’re scrobbling, Last.fm makes new music recommendations based on your listening habits. At the very minimum, using Last.fm is a convenient way to discover what your favorite music is based on actual play (see the chart of my listening over the last four years, broken down by band). These charts are a gateway to new connections, as Last.fm provides lists of musical “neighbors” who have similar taste. This allows you to listen in on what others are currently playing or to playlists based on their favorite songs. In short, Last.fm makes all its members disc jockeys who explore music for their friends and visitors to their profile.

Each band page includes suggested friends and groups, where you can become involved in conversations. Band descriptions are communally edited, as are entries on Wikipedia, and sometimes suffer for it. For example, the entry for Led Zeppelin takes several sentences to explain who almost joined the band (The Who’s Keith Moon and John Entwistle) before actually listing the members of the band. A variety of desktop tools are available to tag and augment your music. 

Last.fm is a privacy-conscious company, something that deserves recognition in light of social sites’ proclivity for privacy abuse. You can erase the record of your listening or your entire account, except for postings to forums, at any time. More sites should let members disappear if they choose.

Local versions available in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Chinese.

Home Page: Last.fm
A social network for music and fans of music with extensive services for integrating music playlists in other social and Web sites.

Free and fee (ad-free, enhanced memberships are $3.00/€2.50 a month or $36.00/€30.00 a year)

Tags: concerts, music recommendations, music-sharing, playlists, tagging, widgets

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.