Last.fm Review

Last.fm is a social service that records what you listen to, and then presents you with an array of interesting things based upon your tastes — artists you might like, users with similar taste, personalized radio streams, charts, and much more.

When you create your account on Last.fm it will ask you to download the Last.fm software. If you have a player like Shock 3, you can skip this step since it has a built in plug-in. If you're using a player such as Winamp you must download this in order to obtain the correct plug-in.

The Last.fm software has a very easy step-by-step setup wizard that allows you to enter your Last.fm Username and Password. It will then search for supported media players already installed on your system. After that you can select which players you wish to use Scrobbler on.

How does it work?

When you play a song either 50% or 120 seconds without seeking, the song is entered into a submission queue. At the submission interval, usually 1 minute, the queue is then posted on your Last.fm profile.

Why should I use Last.fm?

Like I mentioned above, you get a lot of neat personal stats like, Weekly Top Artists, Overall Top Artists, Overall Top Tracks, similar artists you may like, people with similar taste even personalized radio streams. It also has community charts for Top artists and Top Tracks.

The service also provides an array of data feeds (RSS, XML, etc) for you to use on your personal blogs/websites (look on the bottom right of my page for an example).

You can also create customized graphical charts for your website.

If you have an iPod you can use a program named iSproggler (Win32) or iScrobbler (Mac) to scrobble tracks you play on your iPod.

The Last.fm social service is just amazing for music lovers. It has almost an endless amount functions that you can use to your advantage. I've been using Last.fm for 2 years now. Back then it was AudioScrobbler.com. Ever since the change to Last.fm the website has blown up to be bigger than any of the developers could have imagined. If I'm not mistaken I believe the website was originally a school project. Pays off to do your homework I suppose.

View pioneer's Last.fm profile.

+AllenG