Listened to over 3000 tracks on last.fm – a general howto

A few months ago I learned to know about last.fm and it soon became my favourite and most used internet and web2.0 application. Like all social internet apps it makes more fun the more people use it and share it.  This one is about personalized web radio … it gives you the ability to customize radio stations according to your own taste, share your music with your friends, see what they listen to and of course also listen to their stuff.

With this post I just want to describe some basic features, terminology and how to use it.

To listen to music on last.fm, you don’t need to sign-up and register, but in order to personalize your music in an appropriate way and make usage of the functions and benefits a registration is required.

Profile
Each registered user does have an individual profile. Based on a profile you can connect with friends, share your music, get recommendations, add personal events and modify your own music library.
URL: http://www.last.fm/user/username Example – My profile

Library
The library is the central component of a user’s profile. A library is basically a set of artists and tracks. Each listened track will be put into the user’s library. Additionally users can also add artists/tracks manually.
URL: http://www.last.fm/user/username/library

Tags
To tag something means adding an individual atttribute to something. At last.fm you can either tag artists, albums or tracks. Tagging gives the possibility to identify the taste of music, identify user’s with similar taste and get recommendations. It can also give you a visual overview of the kind of music you have in your library with means of a tag cloud.
URL: http://www.last.fm/user/username/library/tags Example

Listen
There a various ways to listen to music via the last.fm web interface. The general entry point to listen is:
URL: http://www.last.fm/listen

Library
You can either listen to your own library or to that of other users. A library needs to have more than 40 listened tracks or added artists to be played back. Whenever you access any user’s profile and the associated library. There will be a “Play user’s station” button to play it back. In order to playback a library use the following URL: http://www.last.fm/listen/user/username. Example

Recommendations
Based on your own tags and the tags, that other users have given to artists, last.fm will pick similar artists, which are not in your library yet and recommend them to you.
URL: http://www.last.fm/listen/user/username/recommended

Neighbours
Also based on your library and tags, last.fm will identify so-called neighbours with similar taste. If you listen to your neighbors, last.fm will pick tune-in to their libraries randomly. This will result in a similar, but somewhat broader and more individual spectrum than the recommendations.
URL: http://www.last.fm/listen/user/username/neighbours

Artist Radio
This option tries to focus the playback on an individual artist and includes those artists, that have been identified as similar.
URL: http://www.last.fm/listen/artist/artistname Example

Global Tag
With this option you will listen to music that other users have associated a certain tag with. E.g. http://www.last.fm/listen/globaltags/metal or http://www.last.fm/listen/globaltags/punk+rock

Of course there are more possibilities you have with your user account or listening options. This is simply an introduction.
Listening to playlists, loved tracks and user tags is not available with the free account and won’t be covered here, but is described on this blog post

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~ by Matthias Haeussler on 06/07/2009.