Last.fm: Not Just A Tchotchke; CD Baby

I’ve been a member of last.fm for two years now, and am still discovering more things to like about it every day. Originally I signed up because a few friends had, and I wanted to record the music I listened to, as I love pretty charts and graphs. I’ve never been a huge listener of any type of online radio, aside from a podcast here or there. (The quality is usually poor, I have music that I know I like already on my laptop, and the lack of DJs on most sites makes for a real lacking of personality or human touch.) I would occasionally listen to the online feed of an actual station (WICB Ithaca College, WSPN Skidmore, or WEQX), but the quality was still poor.

Recently, however, I transfered all of my music to an exterior hard drive. This means I’m without anything to listen to when I go roaming in search of free wifi. Enter last.fm.

I load up the last.fm program and select from any of their channels – particularly “my neighborhood,” which pulls music that I don’t currently listen to, but which is similar to the music I do, which is always “scrobbled” and collected by the website. It works very well, giving me unknown artists and some I’ve heard of but haven’t investigated. The quality is also great, considering its streaming full-length mp3 tracks.

So problem solved, I have good music to listen to while away from my iTunes playlist. Check out last.fm if you haven’t already, and add me to your friends list.

And because I’m feeling charitable, here’s another website you should definitely check out: CD Baby. It’s a very intuitive and well put together site highlighting tons of independent musicians. I recently watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai in the 8th Dimension (one of my top favorite movies), and heard some really great, textured electronica in one of the special features. With a little searching, I found the album: En-Trance by Brothers Price Music, a digital-only release. While I was at it, I added one of the more than 400 albums associated with Massive Attack and trip-hop, via CD Baby’s “Sounds Like” page. I’ve been looking for more trip-hop other than Massive Attack and Tricky, but it’s hard to stay up-to-date in upstate NY. Problem solved. Very cool.