Last.fm
Submitted by jim on Wed, 11/09/2005 - 05:42
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I'm always about a mile off the bleeding edge, but thought I'd post a bit on my new infatuation: Last.fm. I just tuned it to a station "Similar music to The Drive-By Truckers", and these are the first 10 songs it gave me:
1. Lucinda Williams - Drunken Angel
2. Steve Earle - Amerika V 6 0
3. The Mountain Goats - Star Dusting
4. Modest Mouse - Alone Down There
5. Wilco - Handshake Drugs
6. Big Star - O Dana
7. Beck - Halo of Gold
8. Tom Waits - Jayne's Blue Wish
9. Yo La Tengo - Take Care
10. The White Stripes - I Cant Wait
Not bad! Some surprising but effective choices, and lots of songs I loved. If this is representative, the site's a keeper. But like I said, y'all know this already.
Also, Pandora is now free. It has absolutely no coverage of anything beyond popular music.
Cool. I was using Audioscrobbler before they merged it became another part of last.fm. It's pretty cool, but I wish it tracked your "favorite artists" by play length, not tracks played. I can listen to The Beatles and Morton Feldman for 1 hour each and last.fm will pretend I like the Beatles 15x more than Morton Feldman because they have very short track lengths. Also, their recommendations engine isn't quite so good when it comes to contemporary classical.
But for pop music, I was usually happy with the recommendations. Glad you found it and liked it!