Last FM Rocks

I watched The Gadget Show on Five tonight. Are you surprised? They had quite a fun feature where they tried to wean one of the presenters off his Apple habit by doing things like giving him an electric shock whenever his iphone was slower than the competition.

One of the things that came out of this was a mention for last.fm as a replacement for iTunes, the Apple music store. This went down a storm with the Apple lover, and so I took a look myself.

Turns out it is wonderful. If you fancy a completely free, streamed service that will send you your favourite tunes to a PC or mobile device (the iPhone client is lovely) then you would be bonkers not to take a look.

You calibrate it by giving a few of your favourite artists and then it either plays tracks from them or suggests others you might like. All for free. If you actually want to buy any of the tracks that you are hearing you can press a button and download them there and then. The new iTunes has a feature called Genius that works like this, but it either plays your own music or suggests things that you can buy.  Last fm on the other hand gives you a free soundtrack for your life anywhere you can get a network connection, including 3G and even Edge (although I guess the quality won't be the best on low bandwidth connections).

Actually, while I'm mentioning amazing things to do with iPhones, I should really give a shout out to Shazam (you can get it for other platforms too).  It is a free application that tells you what music is playing on the radio. Let the program listen to a snatch of the song and it will go online and then more often than not come back with full details. It is truly amazing, and I've no idea how it works.

Comments

[Mathew S]

Ive been on Last.fm for a few years now, the best feature by far is that is tells you your most played song/artist, and it works with most media players out there.

[Coops]

Yea, same here. I love it. Im noticed that at certain times of year I listen to different types of music.

It does limit the amount of times you can listen to a certain song though but to be honest by that point you really should have bought it.

[JDog - Joel Parkey]

I have to check that out as I love listening to Pink Floyd but don't own everything they have ever created :)

[Mathew S]

Ive not really used it for streaming though, i the addon for WMP or WinAmp and listen to the music i have, I use MusicBrainz tagger to keep all the music i have, correctly labeled.

[[ICR]]

A couple of other options include http://www.songza.com/ and http://www.spotify.com/en/

Spotify is currently invite only, but if you send an email to andrewjanuary at gmail.com I'll send you an invite.

[Jonty Wareing]

You'll be please to know that two of your former students work at last.fm - me and Jono Cole. (We were very involved with freeside a few years ago, along with Wesley Mason)

Make sure you install the last.fm software so it can track everything you listen to....

(Oh, and enjoy your new subscriber account)

[JDog - Joel Parkey]

Also apparently neither do they(they as in Last.fm) have any more Pink Floyd than I do.

[Rob]

Excellent to find ex-Hull students working on something so neat. Keep up the good work guys.