Last.fm the Robotic DJ

I really enjoy listening to new music.  What I don’t really enjoy is the process of actually trying to find new music.  Some of the brilliant folks over at Last.fm and Audioscrobbler have made the process simpler and more intelligent.

Here’s how it works.

Install their plugin on your computer.  Then just listen to your music in iTunes (or other player) and each time you play a song the Audiocrobbler plugin will send the song information back to their mothership servers.  So Last.fm/Audioscrobblere knows what you’re listening to and how many times you’ve listened to each track.

That information is then compared to all other users in the system and it generates a bunch of musical information for you.

It generates a list of recommendations for you to look at.  This feature alone is pretty awesome.  Just leave it to the big computer to tell you what you’re going to like!  No seriously its actually pretty cool and it’s picks are pretty amazing.

The system also creates a list of your "musical neighbors".  In other words it tells you who else has similar taste in music.  So you can go look through the music they’ve listened to and see if something interests you.

What’s really awesome is that you can just listen to the music right away.  They have a music player that will stream the music you’re probably going to like.  You can also listen to music based on tags.  So you’re an emo nerd hit up the "emo" tag and hit "start radio."  It will lauch the music player and begin playing the tracks tagged "emo" by the users.

Its as if you have your own robotic DJ who only computes music.   Yay for musical robots.