indessed roscivs

Lately at work I’ve been tuning in to an online “radio station” called last.fm. The gist of it is this: you type in a name of a popular artist that you like (say, Barenaked Ladies or They Might Be Giants) and they play music from similar-sounding artists. Just like radio, it’s a great way to discover new music once you’re tired of your same old playlist over and over again.

The great thing is that because last.fm is licensed as a radio station (since they just stream music and don’t actually allow you to say, “Play me this song”), they can legally use music from just about every artist under the sun, from the Beatles to Madonna to Matchbox 20 to Dalida. It’s awesome.

Everything’s not perfect, though. Their Flash plugin (that plays the music) hiccups under Linux, and I can’t get their Linux client to run on my relatively up-to-date Fedora box, so I’m limited to listening at work only (where I’m saddled with a Windows laptop that does nothing but check email all day). Also, it seems like they could do so much more than just play me songs that are similar to a single artist. Why can’t I put in the names of dozens of artists that I like, and last.fm uses all of them to make recommendations? And when I come across a new artist that I particularly like, it could use that to make even further recommendations.

Well, actually, I think last.fm can do at least some of what I’ve described, but not via the Flash plugin player where, as far as I can tell, I’m limited to a single artist “station” (I spent most of my time today listening to the “Sounds like Fairouz” station). I think you have to download their special client in order to get the cooler features. But, unfortunately, it won’t run without admin permissions on my Windows laptop (stupid Windows), and as I already mentioned, I can’t get the Linux client to install properly on FC5.

Oh well. It may not be the “Social Music Revolution” just yet, but at least it gives me something pleasant to listen to while cranking out code (and lets me discover new artists I like too). Why not give it a shot yourself?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.