You might or might not be aware how seriously i’m addicted to last.fm. Actually i’m rather addicted to music and i love statistics, so last.fm is just the perfect place for me. No surprise it’s always open in a browser tab and it’s among the top visited sites in all my browsers. However, i’m not subscribed, because the only reason i could imagine doing that is the Radio feature, but the times i tried it, it simply didn’t work so well. After 2-3 songs suddenly something totally out-of-place would pop up and i’d rather close it and return to my own library.
But now it’s all changed with seeing one single tweet. Last.fm announced the launch of their new service called Discover. It claimed that it’ll help me find me new favorite artist–and truth be told, it has the best of chance to do so. Unlike the Radio, i haven’t seen anything here indicating a limit on songs i can listen for free, and i definitely do love discovering new and/or underground bands. It works based on tags, so there might be some songs that seem out of place, but then i can just click “something different” to find something more to my taste or “more like this” if i liked something.
Of course the songs listened in Discover scrobble, so you don’t have to worry about them not showing up in your stats (i would). I only listened for less than half an hour now, and already i have found countless bands i’ll be sure to keep on my watchlist–too bad most of them are too underground to find songs or chances of coming to Japan, but i hope their local audiences will be enthusiastic enough and they’ll reach great heights. I only used the “something different” button once or twice, and i guess that last.fm will use these clicks to refine results and suggestions. It would be very awesome if they could even further improve the tag system and the suggestions–i’ve found so many awesome bands there, just now it’s stuffed with stuff i know i don’t want (even though they are of genres i like (so i don’t really want to remove them), just my library is simply saturated with their kind already), but i’d love some more bands from a few genres on the margin as of now, mostly because i couldn’t find more.
The only problem with Discover is that it didn’t play back in Chromium (Ubuntu, latest version). It plays the music just fine in Firefox, though there the animations are a bit more laggy. But who cares, i’m not watching it, i’m listening to it. And i’ll keep listening to it, because it’s awesome.
