Last.Fm

I recently discovered a very helpful web service. And as usual, I am a bit late and behind on discovering it. Last.fm is a pretty decent online ‘radio’ service. You can enter an artist or tag and bam you get music.

For a very small fee ($3.00 per month) you can also access more features like having you own station. So I decided to pay for a couple of months to check out the full feature set. It was worth the small cost, although you do have to invest time in making it work to your taste.

Your station does not magically find you music. By ‘Love’ing’ songs from artists Last.Fm slowly begins figuring out what genres and styles of music you like and putting together your station. At the start you tend to get a very repetitive mix that really has only your Loved tracks and mostly random things thrown in, but the more you Love or Ban the better it gets.

Mostly I have found the service very useful for work. I have now started listening almost exclusively to Japanese pop and rock songs when I am not on the phone at my office. The fact that I don’t actually understand the vast majority of what I hear cuts down on the distraction factor of wanting to sing along with my favorite songs.

We’ll how it works out in the long run.