last.fm

Now that I have a non-satellite Internet hook-up, one of my great joys is to be able to have last.fm in the house...at last. I'd only been able to access it when I was in town (one of the disadvantages to country livin'). Really glad I can use my account now! In fact I have it playing right now.

last.fm is a music service that helps you find music you might like in a kind of fractial fashion...you list some artists or albums you like, and it suggests others from a database of other users who like similar things and also liked the artist or album in question. So you say you like Chad & Jeremy, it'll suggest 5 or 6 other similar artists, like the Beau Brummels or the Vogues...you either say "yeah" or "nah", and it'll adjust its suggestions accordingly. As you go on you can find some really interesting and obscure music that you'd never find otherwise, as well as old stuff you knew but forgot about.

And the lovely thing is that you can have a library of this music and just access it to play on your computer while you blog or whatever! Or follow links to purchase a CD. Good mojo for both listener and musician. Hey, wait, now they're playing Roky Erikson...fantastic...anyhow, hop over and check it out at http://www.last.fm/home for lots of great music...

Here's the Wiki folks again to explain the mechanics much better than I can...

Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed over 40 million active users based in more than 200 countries.[1] On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD).[2]

Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the songs the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user's computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") either via the music player itself (Spotify, Amarok) or via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user's profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.