CBS buys last.fm
One of my favorite music sites, last.fm was bought Wednesday by CBS. I’m not sure when I first joined last.fm. Actually, I am – according to my user page it was on April 24, 2006. Since then, last.fm has been quietly watching what I listen to at work and home (and sometimes in the car).
I’m very happy to give this info away in return for suggestions of new music to buy and even just the ability to look back at what I was listening to. I wish I had that data from when I was 16 (purely because it would be a riot). I have discovered tons of bands via last.fm that I never would have found otherwise.
Since I joined, they’ve continued to come up with all sorts of new and cool ways to improve the experience and make it a community, not just a service. I love their philosophy of opening their data in useful ways. Hopefully, being owned by CBS won’t turn them into a corporate suckfest. I’ll certainly give them the benefit of the doubt as some competitor would surely step into the vacuum.
If you haven’t tried it, and you listen to music on your computer a lot, give it a shot.
Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for 
I just recently started listening to last.fm after reading about it here. I had been listening to Pandora (www.pandora.com), which is a similar service that recommends music based on artists or songs you like. It doesn’t have as much of the Web 2.0 social networking focus that last.fm has, though they started adding in those types of features last December.
Pandora uses their concept of a music genome to recommend music based on the attributes like “synthetic sonority” or “electronica influences”. You train the system over time by telling it what you like and don’t like.
I like both services, though I still find they both pick “odd” choices once in a while. Perhaps something that blends the genetic (Pandora) and social (last.fm) approaches would be best?