Welcome to the pond

I'm sure many of you have heard of last.fm. I had heard about it too, and last night I spontaneously signed up for it. The basics: You download a plugin for your computer's music player (mine is Winamp) and it will send the names of the tracks from directories you specify to the webiste. There, you will find charts of you most-listened-to songs and artists. You can also listen to semi-custom radio stations, join groups of other music lovers and even write a blog.

I think this will be a cool thing for me, but I'm not sure how much I'll use it. I think I'll mostly use it as a music community. I've already begun writing little blog journals there about songs that I like. I suppose it's the music equivalent of Myspace.

Things that suck about it: The charts on your profile don't always update very fast. However, you can always see updated stats at the "charts" link. Also, you have to be a paid subscriber to listen to your Personal station or other people's Personal stations. I hate paying for stuff like that! I'm not going to subscribe, because I probably won't be on it much when I do get a job.

The cool thing about last.fm's radio, though, is that you can play a "tag station." That will play you random songs that have been tagged with a specific word. Assuming people do diligent tagging, that can get you some very cool playlists. Otherwise, I'll stick to Pandora.com. That's free, at least. You can't really do genres, but it's very responsive to songs and artists that you like.

My last.fm user profile can be found at www.last.fm/user/rfduck/

My last.fm journal can be found at www.last.fm/user/rfduck/journal/