In case you’ve always relied on just few friends to recommend new music, you might want to expand your list of friends. last.fm, while not necessarily news to anyone who has been on the web looking for music, is an easy way to do just that. With hundreds of thousands of users, last.fm has built a huge database of musical tastes based on their users’ preferences. You can start by typing in an artist you like, and recommendations for other artists you might appreciate will pop up. Based on all these recommendations, you can create your own library, and even your own “radio station.” Finally, you can just listen to your “library” or your station on your computer while you’re doing all the rest of the stuff you have to do while chained to your computer.
If you don’t want to bother retyping the names of your favorite artists, last.fm can connect to your iPod via a downloadable piece of software. It picks though your song lists and makes recommendations.
Only a couple of caveats: the navigation is a little convoluted, and sometimes there are bandwidth problems. Sometimes when you’re surfing around the site, you’ll lose the song you were listening to and there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to get back to it. (This problem can be solved by just opening another window and doing your surfing there. Just don’t start another song or you’ll have two going at once.) Also, buffering is sometimes slower than you can play the song, so it will interrupt itself and you’ll get a little dead air while you wait for the stream.
The site supports itself with advertising, subscriptions, and selling mp3 downloads of songs. You might want to consider a subscription (2.50 euros per month–about $3.27 US at today’s exchange rate.) If you subscribe, you get unlimited listens to a song–non subscribers can only listen to a song three times–and you won’t see any ads.
Our best tip: start with Frank Sinatra and see where he takes you.
