The Brilliance of last.fm
I like listening to music I like. That’s a fairly stupid thing to say, I know, but hear me out.
I like listening to music, but I couldn’t tell you exactly why I like the music I do. What I do know is that my music tastes seem to stop at around the mid to late 90s. So unless I want to just listen to everything I already own over and over again, I need to find some way of hearing some new music. Some ‘new’ music discoveries have come from reading other blogs (see the forthcoming post on my discovery of Bob Dylan), but unless I want to listen to the radio, it gets a little tricky finding new music to listen to. Honestly, I just can’t listen to the radio these days. I know there are good shows out there, like Radcliffe & Maconie on Radio 2, and Marc Riley on 6 music, but I just don’t feel like I’ve got the time to devote to listening to them, on the off-chance they might play something new that I like. It’s for that reason that I think the music-based social networking site last.fm is fucking great.
For those readers who’ve never seen last.fm – go-on. Click the link and take a look, then come back here. I can wait.
Finished? Good. Believe me, you’ll want to bookmark the site, because once you get started, you’ll be wanting to go back regularly. (Can I suggest that if you plan to go back a lot, it might be worth installing adblock plus under firefox if you plan to visit a lot?)
OK, so what exactly is last.fm? In essence, it’s a mix of three different things. First and foremost, it’s a music tracking site (with accompanying applications), with a huge database behind it. The idea is that the site and the application keeps a track of what you listen to (called ‘scrobbling’), and analyses what you play and offers you lots of information about your favourite artists, and suggestions for other music you might like. You don’t have to take any of those suggestions, but they’re there if you want to step outside your usual listening habits.
Secondly, the site now has a huge library of licensed music that it can play out on customised radio stations. It records the details of the tracks you listen to and, amongst other things, it will let you play a station featuring only music that you like (or is part of your library at any rate). Now, this isn’t perfect by any means, and the limiting factor is that not all of the music you have in your library is licensed by last.fm and therefore it can’t be played on your radio station. However, once you’ve built up a sizeable library, you’ll barely be able to notice the stuff that’s missing. As well as a station based on what you’ve already played, you can select band-specific stations (although the bands in question can’t always be played – such as the Beatles station, or Bob Dylan radio). These stations play music either by that band (if available), or bands in the same genre. In this way, you get to hear music that (mostly) matches your tastes, and expands your listening library at the same time.
The final bit of last.fm is the social networking side. The social networking features of last.fm aren’t really on a par with something like facebook; let’s be honest, no-one is going to abandon facebook for last.fm. However, what the site does is allow you to join groups of users who are into the same sort of music, make ‘friends’ with other users, and see what they’re listening to, and also to see what other users with similar tastes to yours are listening to. There’s a huge community of people who love music on last.fm, so you’ll be guaranteed to find people with tastes like yours.
So, I’ve explained what the site is and how it works. However, the key component of last.fm is the way that everything hangs together. While the site itself could do with a few improvements (the navigation isn’t always obvious), the thing that impresses me the most is the volume of data crunching done, and the innovative ways that the simple collection of listening data can be turned into a load of weird and wonderful displays. Many of the things linked below are found on the last.fm playground which I discovered only very recently. If you’re a regular user of the site, I recommend keeping an eye on this page.
For instance, how about seeing your recent listening habits illustrated in the form of a London-style tube map? Easy. How about seeing all of the music listening on the site depicted as a series of tag/genre islands? No problem. 
There’s a load of other information available on the site, as you can see in the gallery below, such as artist biographies, links to music videos both on the site itself and on youtube, your own weekly, monthly and all-time charts…
And the reason I’m posting about last.fm now? Well, it’s mainly down to it’s inclusion in the forthcoming Xbox 360 system update. For the first time, I can actually use last.fm away from the PC. As great as the website is, why bother streaming my music over the internet (and not hearing everything I own, due to licencing restrictions), when I could just listen to the music that’s right there on the hard drive? Now, there’s actually a really good reason to use the radio station functionality.
The implementation of last.fm on Xbox 360 has opted to concentrate on the music, rather than the more social sides. I’m sure the social aspects will be delivered in the future, because it would be fascinating to find out what sort of music your xbox live friends listen to, and to find out the sort of games your last.fm friends are playing. The focus on the radio stations is a sensible one though, since it’s allowed the developers the chance to implement a really simple, clean user interface, based on the 360′s “New Xbox Experience” sliding menu selection UI. Not only can you play your own library tracks (including tracks that seemingly aren’t licenced to play on the website… very odd), you can play your recommendations station, and stations for your top 50 artists. Ignoring your library altogether, you can play stations of the top 50 most popular artists on the site, listen to genre radio based on tags added by other users, or choose from a selection of videogame related stations. All of the tracks played through the last.fm stations on the 360 can be scrobbled (or not, if you’re trying some stations that you think you might not like). And while the music’s playing, you get to see a selection of photos of the band, or the chance to read the band’s biography from the last.fm site. It’s all very, very slick. The last.fm app is currently only available as part of the Xbox live preview programme, but should be available to all Xbox Live gold subscribers on or around 17th November.
The last thing to mention is the applications that power the site. The original windows scrobbler can be downloaded here, and there are versions available for the iphone/ipod as well as for android phones and the blackberry. The most important thing for me is the availability of Zenses. Zenses is a brilliant application which uses some simple logic to pull listening statistics from MTP devices (newer generation mp3 players) and can create scrobbles to be sent to last.fm. If you own a Creative Zen device and have been looking on enviously while your iPod owning friends get to scrobble tracks, then download Zenses from the beta site here and get scrobbling.
And the best thing of all about last.fm? The world-beating site was founded and is still based and developed here on these shores, with it’s development office based in Shoreditch, in Central London. Britain still rules when it comes to music…!
All that remains is to say…….let the new music discovery begin. 
Forget listening to last.fm on xbox. Just get an iPod, you can listen to it through your headphones as long as your close to wifi. Agree with you, last.fm is genius.
Aye. Must agree too. Been dabbling a little with last.fm recently and it saves listening to some of the garbage on the radio. Although admittedly Radio 2 and 4 have some cracking comedy on board that also makes for easy listening.