Last.fm--The Social Music Revolution

I just signed up with Last.fm, a social networking music community. I think it's going to be really cool. It uses open-source plugins and players (under the Creative Commons license) to integrate with your media library and current media player (support for WMP, iTunes, Winamp, and a bunch more), to automatically send anonymous listening information to your account. It synthesizes the data it recieves, and builds a set of "Neighboring" users who like the same music as you. You can listen to their songs if they have a paid account.

Last.fm also has web radio stations of a bunch of different genres at 128kbps (CD-quality) that stream through an opensource, extremely small player. Last.fm supports tagging, blogging, etc.

It also generates listening statistics for you, following trends automatically.

To me, however, it's the community surrounding Last.fm that seems most wonderful. I never jumped on the MySpace bandwagon--I'd rather stick with real friends, not virtual avatars. But Last.fm is your "music friends." I like that: it's a way to find out about bands that I'd never find otherwise.

Which is the other plus of Last.fm. There's a massive library of full-streaming and 30-second sample streaming indie songs that are really good, but don't get publicity because they aren't on a major label.

Finally, here's my Last.fm profile. If you like what I listen to, add me to your friends list.

Last.fm also generates a list of the most recent songs you listened to. Here's mine as of this posting:

Edit: Actually, the above list isn't as of the posting; it changes automatically as I listen to more music. What you're looking at now is the most recent songs I've played on my computer.