How to Do More with Last.fm

Learn some tips and tricks for getting the most out of Internet streaming music service Last.fm.

Streaming Internet radio sites such as Pandora and Slacker provides a simple and direct way to connect people with the music they love but for serious music fans, the site that blows them all the way is Last.FM. Of course you’ll have to take my opinion with a grain of salt, simple as CNET and Last.FM are properties of CBS but regardless, if you’re new to Last Fm or just a casual fan, I’ve got some tips on taking your experience to the next level. At first glance Last.FM works just like any other streaming music service. The homepage gives you a little textbox where you can input your favorite artist and with just a few clicks, you’re listening to a mix of their songs along with similar bands. But what Last.FM does better than all the rest is that it tracks your listening history and the songs you favorite and then connects you with similar listeners or what last Fm calls “neighbors”. Now once you’ve got the basics down, there are three main ways to push your experience with Last.FM. You can improve the data that you put in, you can do more of the data that you get out and you can listen to last fm on more stuff. The first technique means finding ways to make Last.FM record of your listening habits as accurate as possible. If all you ever do with Last.FM is stream easy listening music at work, it’s going to have a really distorted view of your taste in music. Ideally you want your profile to page to reflect all the music you listen to. This means every song on your iPod, every tune on your computer or even the music you hear on other sites. The trick to getting all your music tracks by Last.FM is to download their Squabbler application. This program monitors your song plays in popular program like iTunes, WinAmp and Windows Media Player and updates your Last.FM profile automatically. In iTunes, it will even keep track of song plays from your iPod or your iPhone. If you listen to a lot of music from sites other than Last.FM, try searching the web to see if anyone has created a mashup site that combines Last.FM open API with the other sites that you’re using. For example, Pandora listeners can use a site called Last Pandora to get their Pandora tracks counted on last fm. Some sites like Height Machine have Last.FM integration built right in. if you snoop around in the account settings. Okay so that covers getting more data into Last.FM. Right off the bat, all that listening data is going to allow Last.FM to give you better song recommendations and help tailor your personal recommendations and help tailor your personal radio stations. But there’s tons more you can do with this stuff. If you head over to build.last.fm, you can find hundreds of ways to do something called your Last.FM profile data. There are album cover screensavers, stand alone desktop radio players, plug ins for blogs and social networks and options for showing off your listening trends using all kinds of crazy charts. But one of my favorite users for my Last.FM stats is right here on my profile page. If you’ve ever joined a social network or some sight that gives you a profile page asking about your taste in music, this feature lets you copy and paste all of your top artist out of Last.FM in one shot. There’s also a quick link right next to it where you can embed your top artist onto sites like Facebook, Bebo, Blogger, MySpace, and others. Alright so you’re hooked on Last.FM. You’re obsessed with squabbling all your songs; you’re Last.FM radio stations have been cultivated to play only awesome music. At some point you’re going to want to break Last.FM out of your computer. Fortunately, Last.FM has some great apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android phones and if you have a speaker dock for one of those devices, you can use that same mobile app to tune in Last.FM around your home or office. Finally if a single-speaker system isn’t enough, Both Sonus and Logitech offer multi-room music systems that can blanket every room of your home with music from Last.FM. So there you go. Those are some tips for digging deeper into Last.FM, for CNET.com, I’m Donald Bell.