Music lovers of the world unite

I have been playing around for the past couple of days with last.fm and it’s nothing like other online music/ radio services that I have used. It’s ad-free, features multi-platform clients and learns about your musical tastes as you go along.

It allows you to tune in to specific genres/ artists using tag based channels or listen to artists that sound similar to your favourite as categorized by other users. You can “love”, “hate”, recommend (to friends) tracks/ artists and/ or associate them with tags (think genres, mostly) for your own as well as the community’s benefit, all with a single click. It also offers the facility to “scrobble” tracks you’re listening locally (via, say, iTunes) onto your last.fm profile.

All this increases the probability of hearing the kind of music you’ll like, which makes it a great way of discovering new artists as well as getting your daily does of all time favourites. The last.fm catalogue contains both mainstream as well as other artists and isn’t restricted to English music – for hindi music, for example, try tags bollywood or ghazal.

If you like to shout from the rooftops about your musical tastes, point people to your last.fm homepage or use one of the many personalized RSS feeds. Check out the tools section for many other goodies.

There are many other features (like free music downloads) and since this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive review but an attempt to nudge you in the right direction, I’ll stop right here and allow you to explore. Get started by downloading the player for your OS and signing up at their website. The quality of the streams is second to none and, best of all, the service is free.

How can they afford it? Well so far they seem to be surviving thanks to a mix of VC funding, advertising revenue and affiliate income by pointing people interested in buying music to online retailers like Amazon.

You can see what I have been listening to lately at this page and perhaps add me as a friend once you’ve signed up so we can exchange recommendations – optional 😉

PS – I’ve recently learnt about Pandora, a similar site/ service. Maybe next week, I’ll review nudge you towards that once I’ve had a chance to play with it.