17 posts from 2006

"The social music revolution" is part of the last.fm logo, and couldn't be more true.
Up until recently I've relied on Pandora as my music discovery service, but last.fm has so much more to offer that it puts itself in a whole new category.
Pandora's box still serves as the best personalized streaming radio, but as far as music discovery there is allot to discovery on last.fm.

I'll try to briefly describe the stuff last.fm can do for you, what you can do for last.fm and others like you.

Basically last.fm is ALL about the users.
Users interact with last.fm either trough the last.fm website or the last.fm application. Both allow the user to tag music, and inform last.fm what music you listen too using scrobbling.
This allows the miracle of social tagging - you don't need to trust reviews, publicity or popularity to find good music, trust what millions of people around the world are listening on their computer and learn about similar music using the tags they mark it with.

last.fm doesn't need to update it's databases with new artists, songs and albums. It doesn't make subjective choices of who is better. The user without even lifting a finger does it all simply by listening to music.
Albums, tracks and artist and cataloged automatically when last.fm scrobbles the user's music.
Artist from all over the world, popular and not, with listeners counting from millions to just you and five more people,  are all listed in last.fm, with info about them added by the users in a wiki-like style, and their tracks and albums are displayed by listener popularity - so if you are interested in a new artist, you can check his best songs first.
Also, for most known artist, last.fm allows you to listen to 30 second samples of the song, online from the the artist's page.
Say you like Evanescence's new song Call Me When You're Sober, you can listen to all the other tracks on their The Open Door album.
You can also see the album is tagged Gothic Rock. Tagging applies to the artist, an album and single tracks separately, so you no longer see genre branding like "rock/pop" for an entire artist who's work differs completely from album to album over the years, and you can see what artists are related to every specific tag.
Also in the artist's page you can find similar artists, tracks charts based on what users are listening too, future events, photos and bio, all based on user input.

So who is this magic user that makes last.fm what it is ?
It's you !
After you register (for free) and use one of it's scrobbling methods (either using it's own program, or a plug-in to your favorite player) you become an active contributer to the community. When you listen to music you tell last.fm what music you like. when you tag songs, albums or artist, you tell last.fm and the world what this music is all about.
The more music you listen to, the more last.fm understands your taste and offers you new music suggestions at your dashboard.
This dashboard shows what your friends (who you made contact with on last.fm) are listening to, what your neihbours (users with similar taste) are listening to, new artist you haven't tried yet which last.fm believes you will like, full length tracks you can listen to and more.

At every users's page (see mine for example), you can see the last tracks he listened to (and even publish them using html/rss), his favorite tracks and artist and more. If you are a user of last.fm as well, you can see how much your musical taste matches with another user based on the similar artists you listen to.
Users can message each other, blog, participate in groups and even recommend music to each other or to whole groups.

There is so much to cover on last.fm, that there isn't enough room on this page to go trough it all.
If you are a devoted music listener, no matter what your musical taste is like, you will enjoy using last.fm. You will also be glad to hear last.fm supports extended languages such as Hebrew and Chinese.

In this eye-dazzling game, you play a colored blob who's aim is to color the dull Utrecht city by consuming it's colorful citizens, while avoiding the ink police.