An entry about last.fm. And why not? It is what has been keeping me sane for the last days.

Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler music engine. More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users “scrobble” their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world’s largest social music platform.

Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user’s musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.

Founded by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones, we are a London-based company with a music-obsessed team of developers and creative professionals from around the world.

It’s never been this easy to share your taste and discover new music. Welcome to the social music revolution.

So… What do they mean by “scrobble”? Basically last.fm provides you with a plugin for your favorite mp3 player (xmms, Winamp, Amarok, Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc…) that sends back to the last.fm servers what musics you listen to, enabling them to “know” what kind of music you like, and who else has the same musical taste as you do. Now. This is very interesting, because then, you can check out what musics have your “neighbors”, as they call them, have been listening to. And well, if you have a similar taste, why not listen to some of the other artists/tracks they have been listening to recently? It’s great! That way you can find many new artists.

But that’s not the end of it! last.fm is like a multimedia encyclopedia of artists and tracks. You can see what albums have an artist released, what tracks that album has, and you can even listen a bit of those tracks, so you can see if you really like them. You can also see information related to the artist, how they began, where are they from, etc…

And no, there’s even more! My favorite part!

They also provide you with their own music player for several platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS and FreeBSD), that enables you to listen to on-line radio.

But the thing is, you may choose on this program to listen to your neighbors’ tracks, which means that you’ll stream and listen to music that is very likely to please you, because your neighbors have the same taste as you do!

As you can see from the screenshot below, you will even get information about the track/artist you are currently listening to. If you don’t like the music, you can skip it, Love it or Hate it (literally), and of course, all of these choices will be accounted for to “build your taste”.

If you want to listen to something more specific, you can do that as well, by searching for Artists or tags.

Don’t like this program, but still want its capabilities? FEAR NOT! You can use something like Amarok, that does the same as this player, and doubles as a really awesome mp3/ogg/etc player.

You can check out my last.fm account here.