A few years ago, if someone asked me what I listened to in iTunes, I would say that iTunes was one of my least-used applications. Now, it’s probably one of my most-used, as I’ve assembled a favorites playlist of over 3 hours of stuff (and that’s not even mentioning my holiday music collection). Therefore, one of the things that I experimented with in preparation of Webmacster87.info 5 was a way to share the music that I’m listening to on my blog. What was the tool I chose? Last.fm.

Last.fm is actually not that well-known of a service, but it’s intended to track the music you listen to and allow you to share it with friends, and also get recommendations based on what you listening to. Some people may also have heard of the old AudioScrobbler plugin, which Last.fm now replaces.

Last.fm offers a downloadable client application for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Whenever you open iTunes or Windows Media Player (for Windows), the Last.fm client will open, and it will “notice” when you’re playing tracks in your media player. The application also shows off info about the song you’re listening to, including cover art, number of plays scrobbled (recorded) on Last.fm, and even an interesting bio about the artist, along with the ability to manage some of your Last.fm settings. However, the main purpose of the application is to track what you play and “scrobble” it, that is, send it to Last.fm’s servers. The software doesn’t actually scrobble your songs right away–it waits for you to play the track for a little bit (depending on track length) before it scrobbles it. In fact, there’s even some unofficial applications out there which can scrobble tracks that you listen to on your iPod.

Your Last.fm user page (see mine) contains a number of stats including your recently listened tracks, your top artists, and your top tracks overall. Some tracks even include 30 second previews which play right in the web browser. In addition, Last.fm is social networking, meaning that it has all the friend features you come to expect, and (of course), it has Facebook integration. Last.fm also allows you to create a widget which displays any of your stats, and also updates itself every minute while you’re actually listening to tracks. Last.fm also has some more advanced features available for a $3/month subscription, but most users should get by just fine with the standard account.

In conclusion, Last.fm is a great service for tracking what music you listen to and sharing it with your friends and the world. It’s a shame that the site isn’t as well known as some of the other major Web 2.0 websites, but if you listen to music fairly frequently, you should check it out. Oh, and add me as a friend.

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Tags: feed, friends, iTunes, music, review, sharing, Software, Web 2.0, website, Windows Media