Idolator

If you're one of those people dreaming of the day that you can find someone who can appreciate your gigantic collection of Jellyfish MP3s, and you don't mind a small piece of software transmitting your shuffle's exact patterns to the entire world—even when you're a little tipsy—then Last.fm is for you.

Name: Last.fm
Where To Find It: http://www.last.fm
High-falutin' description: "The Social Music Revolution"
Actual Purpose: Finding Cute People Who Are Totally Into Your MP3 Collection / Creating A Streaming Radio Station Without Paying Big Bucks For Bandwidth

Thanks to Last.fm, you don't have to go through the small-talk motions with people before you find out what types of music they like—the whole site is a community built around the listening habits of you and other Last.fm users. To get started, you'll need to download and install the Last.fm software, and set up an account.

Last.fm's software has two essential components: The scrobbler and the player.

The scrobbler basically turns your computer's music library into a fountain of statistics about your listening habits that go way beyond the iTunes "Top 25 Songs" playlist. "Scrobbling" is the Last.fm term for the transmission of your musical data to its servers, and while the word is almost as painful to say as "blogging," the process is a pretty painless. Once Last.fm is installed on your computer, your digital music history is available for everyone to see—even when you're drunk. It's usually a real-time process, although sometimes the servers get a bit overloaded and there can be some lag. Every week, your listening data gets compiled into charts like "top artists" and "top songs"; once you've been on Last.fm for a while, you'll also start seeing overall charts, which look at your musical habits since you first installed Last.fm on your computer.

While you're listening to songs, you can add descriptive tags to them; you can also zip around the site, checking out band pages that list discographies and bios, as well as fans, similar artists, and a chart of particular artist's most popular songs.

The other side of Last.fm is the player, which you can use to tune into stations that are created, on the fly, by the data given to Last.fm by users. You can listen to stations based around your favorites, others' recommendations, or tags given to artists and songs by users. The Mac version looks like this:

Note that it has comprehensive info on the band you're listening to—always useful if you've been tuned into a great new song that you've never heard before, or something you never want to hear again. You can also tag songs as favorites or ban them outright from your player. And your listening habits within the player are scrobbled, too, which means that your playlists will constantly be refining themselves.

One last note on Last.fm browsing: You can join groups based around different interests and affiliations—like, say, the Idolator group—and find out the answers to burning questions like "Does everyone from my hometown listen to Billy Joel?" (Just remember that the answer is probably yes.)

Last.fm