If you’re a avid music listener, you’ll know how much it means to listen to new music you like. Most new music you hear come from friends and family recommendations. That limits to how often you exchange music recommendations with them. What if there was an free service that would track what you listen to and recommend you new music as you listen to your favorite songs. Combined with the huge database of music and users just like you Last.fm works as your personal music assistant bringing music, statistic and community together in a single place.
Services like Pandora and Spotify allow you to listen to songs that are similar to your taste. But it doesn’t track music you listen to or the music you have on local media. There’s no data for you to analyze your music listening habits. And it isn’t much flexible as well. Last.fm adds in much needed feature of tracking through all the songs you’ve listened to on your phone or desktop. This gives you an idea of what you like listening to and get similar recommendations.
Scrobbling is a feature that allows third party music applications to send music you listen to Last.fm servers to record it in the database for you. When you listen to your songs through music apps, information like song name, artist name are sent to Last.fm database. These music tracks on the site have unique pages which include their genres and other information. These genres are also added to your profile as music tags you like. The more you listen to the genres of same type, you’re going to get more recommendation of the same music genre.
Another feature called Last.fm neighbours lets you match with users of similar music taste. This can help you find even more similar music they listen to. Add your friends and you can check what they are listening to. Following user lets you check what they are listening to, what their favorite tracks and artists are. You can filter their listening habits by year, month or week.
Last.fm labs is another feature that lets you check experimental features that are in development from Last.fm. Some of the features that are in development are:
Popular right now
See which artists and tracks are popular right now.
Blasts from the past
Rediscover favourite artists that you seem to have forgotten about
Tag filtered library / tags from listening
Browse your library by tag, and see a list of tags that you listen to
Lastly, Last.fm serves as an awesome resource for music listeners world wide. The service is free of cost and setting up your account and starting off is really easy. The hardest part is getting a music player that you can scrobble your music from. But it’s so going to be worth it. Shuttle Music Player and Poweramp are some music player on android that let you scrobble to Last.fm. Last.fm quick scrobbler can detect music application on your Android device to use the scrobbling feature.
