Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries. [wikipedia]

It is based on the Audioscrobbler plugin created in 2003, by Richard Jones as part of his third-year computer science project while at University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science. Whereas LastFM, founded in 2002 was an “internet radio station and music community site, using similar music profiles to generate dynamic playlists”.

In 2005 the two merged, using Audioscrobber’s ability to log the music its users listened to, as well as finding similar music based on a user’s own listening habits, or based on a particular tag or artist.

I began using Audioscrobber on 27th March 2003 right after reading the BBC News article which featured Richard Jones. Since then the plugin has been connected to whatever player I used for listening to music, which for the majority of the past 6 years, 8 months and 2 days has been through my computer (on Windows it was Winamp, which I still miss, and now iTunes on the Mac).

In the early hours of this morning I clocked up 100,000 plays. A total of 2,303 artists.

As music is such a big part of me, LastFM is the most accurate way to display my taste to others, as well as to inspire the music I want to listen to when my mind goes blank. Or in finding new artists, based on my own taste. If I’m in a piano mood, I will often open the LastFM player and play music under the “piano” tag. Or, as I did a lot a couple of months back, play music similar to “Passion Pit” which has led me to enjoying so much of the electronica I listen to a lot these days.

Befriend me on LastFM.

Tagged lastfm music | 0 Comments