Last.fm: Web 2.0 for music
August 29th, 2008
If you think iTunes is the Web 2.0 way to find and listen to new music think again. Instead of simply delivering music to consumers in a new way, Last.fm uses the crowd to deliver targeted, streaming tunes for free.
Admittedly I didn’t get it at first. I had installed a precurser to the Last.fm software called ‘Audio Scrobbler’ that tracked which songs I listened to in iTunes and created online lists of the tracks and artists I played the most. Interesting but not terribly useful. After Audio Scrobbler was merged into Last.fm the website gained some social features that allowed members to view profiles of other members who had similar musical tastes. This meant if I found another member who liked Josh Joplin I could browse to see what else that member listened to in hopes I would like that music as well. Again, interesting information but not addictive by any means.
But the feature that I initially dismissed as useless is actually the reason I use Last.fm now: streaming stations. With the free Last.fm player you can listen to ’stations’ made up of artists similar to the artist you search for. For example, if you listen to the New Pornographers similar artist station you’ll hear the lesser known Mates of State, Destroyer, and Camera Obscura. The similar artists are determined by other members’ listening patterns and a tag-based system that is frighteningly accurate. Since becoming a Last.fm addict just a few weeks ago I’ve already purchased several CDs of artists I had never heard of before Last.fm.
Of course the streaming music player is limited in that you can’t rewind songs and can only skip forward (you can’t get everything for free, now can you?). The player even integrates information from Amazon, iTunes, and the Wikipedia to give you artist and song information in one location - how’s that for a mashup?
I’ve pretty much stopped listening to my iTunes library at work altogether in favor of Last.fm - now that’s disruptive!
