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Why I Love Last.fm

Up early. Time to deal with vast amounts of unread and unanswered emails (sorry everyone).

Not sure what to listen to.

Been in a My Morning Jacket thing all week but I don't exactly want to listen to MMJ.

So I go to last.fm, put My Morning Jacket into Similar Artist Radio.

And this is what I've listened to in the past 20 minutes:

Wolf Parade - Same Ghost Every Night
M Ward - Story Of An Artist - Daniel Johnston cover
Spoon - Not Turning Off
Wilco - Far, Far Away
Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah - Blue Turning Grey
Arcade Fire - Naive Melody (with David Byrne, Talking Heads cover)
Modest Mouse - Float On

UPDATE: I am signing off last.fm now, but I got these artists after I wrote this post:

Elliot Smith, New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, Neutral Milk Hotel (loving them these days), Yo La Tengo, The Shins, The Decemberists, Iron and WIne, and Belle and Sebastian.

No radio station could top that run. Just awesome.

Comments (6) | Posted December 2, 2006 in My Music

Comments

Hi Fred,

I really like Last.fm too, with 2 caveat:

1) There´s not much adventure in using it... for example, all the bands you listed strike me as pretty obvious for a My Morning Jacket radio, and surely you knew them all. Maybe a bit more of digging will help the service to stay interesting

2) It still sucks for electronic music. If I input a minimal techno artist, probably I don´t want to hear electropop or house, and Last.fm still seems to treat electronic music as a single category.

Posted by: Giordano | Dec 2, 2006 8:23:04 AM

NMH's "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" is a great album if you haven't heard it. Jeff Mangum has a very unique personality, much like Daniel Johnston.

Posted by: Raj | Dec 2, 2006 11:19:38 AM

Giordano, I think last.fm has a bar you can slide from left to right from obscure to popular. it's likely the bar was closer to the right in the above playlist. but still a great playlist for a popular setting!

Posted by: paul | Dec 2, 2006 7:02:24 PM

Does last.fm have any good bands?

Sorry, been in a snit lately.

Rock is dead.

Posted by: jackson | Dec 3, 2006 10:25:57 AM

Fred,

I initially gave last.fm high marks for its radio service and social networking capabilities. But last.fm has since been surpassed in both aspects. Pandora provides a superior internet recommendation radio service in my opinion, and Mog.com is a better structure for connecting people through music. On last.fm I feel a bit isolated by the lack of a central blog location, whereas the blog is king at Mog. None of which makes last.fm a bad site, simply not up to snuff with these other sites. But take your pick, I say, of a great crop of sites and rock on!

Posted by: Zack | Dec 3, 2006 7:41:43 PM

Just started trying out last.fm and it's pretty good on the recommendations front.

I'd like to see where they go with the live event recommendations for cities. I currently use the OnTour dashboard widget on my Mac to check iTunes for artists and OnTour checks NYC venues for events.

Also, I would love to see an addition to these social network like services to track live events that I attended the past. I've been to so many concerts and I would love to see a catalog of where I've been and connect with others that were there too...

Posted by: Matt | Dec 7, 2006 1:10:53 AM

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