Filed under: Music
With the increasing homogenization of music broadcasting (Thanks, Clear Channel!) it’s become almost impossible to discover new music by listening to the radio. Unless Top 40 crap is your bag, you’re pretty much out of luck. Online social networking services can be helpful, such as Amazon.com’s “Customers who bought this also liked…” service, and recommendations based on song ratings. The problem with services like that is you have to spend an inordinate amount of time rating albums. Now along comes Last.fm. Last.fm is like your typical social networking site, but is devoted to music and has one chief advantage over others — it has a plugin that works with most music players such as iTunes that automatically keeps track of what you’re listening to. This means its recommendations for music that might be new to you are based on what you are actually listening to, not what it asks you to rate. It compares what you’re listening to to what others are listening to and makes recommendations based on similarities therein. I’ve just started using the service so I can’t yet comment on how good the recommendations are, but so far I love the fact that I can just set iTunes on shuffle and have my tastes automatically catalogued with no time necessary on my part.
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