Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for music lovers with over 30 million active users from more than 200 countries. Last.fm website provides music discovery and listening service. Users can make their own playlists and share them with friends using its widget-making tool or Facebook application. Last.fm has a wide range of tracks users can listen to and share with others. It also has a recommendation engine that will give you a list of artists it thinks you’ll like, based your personal favorites.
One of its useful services for music junkies is "Scrobbling", which tracks the music you are listening on your computer and sends the information to Last.fm. From there, everyone can look at what you’ve been listening to, how often you’ve listened to it, and give it a try themselves. This music recommending system called "Audioscrobbler" builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of the songs the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user’s computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (”scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm’s music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rights holder has previously authorised it.
The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favorites. Users can have their own blogs where they can write about and reference music they’re listening to, or just write about whatever they want. Like other website startups out there, Last.fm also looking for profit, among others by providing “premium services” which users can subscribe for a fee.
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