threevue

If I could buy stock in last.fm, I would. And it isn’t just the fact that they have David Hasselhoff on their staff (Team Lifeguard). It’s a robust, many-featured music medium that is unbelievably free.

Let’s just run down a typical listening scenario. You have a fairly large mp3 library, organized on iTunes. During your commute to work, you listen to your iPod/iPhone. While at work, you listen to a streaming radio station like Pandora or your iPod. On your way home, same deal. At home after work, you listen to your iTunes library as you cook dinner and do the dishes. Sounds like a lot of different ways to play music, and would be impossible to correctly track right? Wrong. Last.fm works in five awesome ways which are highlighted after the break.

1. The desktop app.
Once you’ve installed it onto your home computer, the last.fm app will open up when you open iTunes. From there, it reads your music library and play history to find the songs you listen to the most. As you can see on the picture at the top of this post, this app read over 15,000 plays from my iTunes history and then subsequently created a last.fm “library” which shows all my artists and tracks, as well as my favorites based on how often I listen to each track. Now, this app will track my listening habits and upload what I’m listening to up to the last.fm site.

2. The site.
Once you’ve created a profile and let the desktop app read your iTunes library, you can then go to the last.fm site and stream your library. Basically, it knows what songs you have in your iTunes library and plays those for you from the site randomly. Or you can listen to recommendations based on your current library. Or you can listen to stations based on an artist you like (see the pic above for “Spoon Radio”). Basically, the site gives you the ability to stream your library (albeit on shuffle the whole time, which is fine by me) from any computer for free.

3. The iPhone app.
The iPhone app essentially does what the last.fm site does – it lets you stream your library, create stations based on artists, or listen to recommendations. It works a lot like the Pandora iPhone app except you can only listen to music you already own, which is perfect for those times when you’re just not in the mood to listen to something new or unknown.

4. “Scrobbled” iPod.
This feature is really just a fundamental part of iTunes but I wanted to mention it anyway. After you listen to music your iPod, your listening history data transfers to your iTunes history when you sync your iPod, which then syncs with your last.fm profile with the last.fm desktop app. So, if you listened to an NKOTB album on your way to work, it would be added to your last.fm profile when you sync your iPod that night when you get home. It’s not a real-time update like the previous three ways to use last.fm, but I thought it would be worth mentioning.

5. Last.fm on your Xbox 360.
This feature isn’t out yet, but from the looks of it you’ll use it just like the last.fm site. This will be good for people that have a nice entertainment setup but no iPod dock hooked up to it. Otherwise, I don’t know if I’ll use it that much.

In conclusion, I can’t believe that the whole last.fm thing is free. It lets me meticulously track all of my music in a number of ways, as well as see what my friends are listening to. I find more and more interesting things about it every day, and I strongly recommend it for anyone.