Loving Last.fm

I never used to listen to music at work, but have started to recently.  The tagga office is open plan and all of our desks are clustered together, so I’ve found that listening to music helps me drown out the background noise and focus on what I’m doing.  One problem I have is that I’m not particularly into music.  My musical knowledge is pathetic, bordering on embarrassing.  I’ve lately had the problem that my iTunes library isn’t big enough to get me through the day with fresh music, which is why I love last.fm.

Last.fm is a web based music suggestion engine that streams you music smilar to that of your preferences.  In the morning, I go to last.fm in my browser and type in one of the few artists I know and like, which usually keeps me going all day.  I generally get a song from the artist I typed in first, then similar artists that I usually like from then on.  Conversely to last.fm’s slogan, I don’t find “the more you listen, the better it gets”.  After a while, I find that the stream will get a bit off track and start playing songs I care for less.  This is only a minor nuisance though, for selecting a new artist and restarting the stream usually gets me grooving again.

For people actually into music, I can see last.fm being used as a tool to find new, cool stuff.  For me, last.fm is music for the lazy and I’m quite enjoying it.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer