I've enjoyed wasting much of today with Last.fm. Finally, a streaming audio site gets it right. (More than half of the time, at least.)
The Last.fm player lets you customize a stream based on genre tags - for example, a playlist of songs tagged as "honky tonk", "alt country", and "americana". Also, you can select a group of artists and enjoy a stream of their music and music from related artists.
This is a great way to dig new music. I've already added a few records to my "to buy on iTunes" list.
Plus - Last.fm "scrobbles" - (their word, not mine) - your listening habits such that you can easily make one of these things to broadcast the artificially generated depth, diversity, and intelligence of your musical interests to the world. This feature detects your listening habits in the Last.fm player, iTunes, and other players.
There is also a fairly deep website with wiki-driven artist bios (very cool) and a community element. I'm sure I could waste countless hours tweaking artist bios, thus, I intend to stay away from the site and just stick to the player...
It remains worth nothing that there are some (somewhat humorous) problems. For instance, "Magical Mystery Tour" just popped up on my "honky tonk" playlist. Not cool. (Perhaps The Beatles pop up on every stream because Last.fm is based in the UK?) A few tunes later, right after a Johnny Cash track, I get Dean Martin. What the heck? Just the beauty - or stupidity - of the community, I suppose.
I've been "testing" the community with other keywords and artists and, like so many community-based streaming services, the stream starts out on point, but eventually wanders into left field. Unfortunately, left field is littered with vapid, watered-down crapola like Coldplay, The Killers and, of course, the crappiest of all crapola, Aerosmith.
Despite it all, I strongly recommend Last.fm. It makes it so easy to wade through the world's great music.
The Last.fm player lets you customize a stream based on genre tags - for example, a playlist of songs tagged as "honky tonk", "alt country", and "americana". Also, you can select a group of artists and enjoy a stream of their music and music from related artists.
This is a great way to dig new music. I've already added a few records to my "to buy on iTunes" list.
Plus - Last.fm "scrobbles" - (their word, not mine) - your listening habits such that you can easily make one of these things to broadcast the artificially generated depth, diversity, and intelligence of your musical interests to the world. This feature detects your listening habits in the Last.fm player, iTunes, and other players.
There is also a fairly deep website with wiki-driven artist bios (very cool) and a community element. I'm sure I could waste countless hours tweaking artist bios, thus, I intend to stay away from the site and just stick to the player...
It remains worth nothing that there are some (somewhat humorous) problems. For instance, "Magical Mystery Tour" just popped up on my "honky tonk" playlist. Not cool. (Perhaps The Beatles pop up on every stream because Last.fm is based in the UK?) A few tunes later, right after a Johnny Cash track, I get Dean Martin. What the heck? Just the beauty - or stupidity - of the community, I suppose.
I've been "testing" the community with other keywords and artists and, like so many community-based streaming services, the stream starts out on point, but eventually wanders into left field. Unfortunately, left field is littered with vapid, watered-down crapola like Coldplay, The Killers and, of course, the crappiest of all crapola, Aerosmith.
Despite it all, I strongly recommend Last.fm. It makes it so easy to wade through the world's great music.