A scouring of the Opera website, looking for new and cool widgets to trick out the Opera 10 Alpha this afternoon, led me to a realization — there are all sorts of social networking music sites out there, and I’ve never, ever looked at them.
So, I went and signed up with last.fm.
Here’s my Music Profile.
Don’t mock the music stats; they’re from iTunes, and I barely use it. So, the numbers are way skewed, and are not at all reflective of the sorts of things I normally listen to.
I’ve downloaded some free q without u tracks that I didn’t have, thanks to last.fm. 🙂
I would say that I am frequently asked what music I’m grooving to but, I hate to say, no one ever asks me what I’m listening to. But now, there’s no excuse. The entire world can know what I’m listening to! And I can even add a sidebar widget to WordPress. 😉
Published by Allyn
A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.
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Last.FM is great in a lot of ways. I like how you can build a customizable radio station from it, based on what you’ve listened to. If you own an iPhone / iPod Touch, the Last.FM app is awesome. In some aspects, I like it better than the Zune Social, though I haven’t found Last.FM users to be as social or interested in adding friends.
If you play music via a different app, you can also get tools so that they report your music – I used to use a last.fm enabled version of Winamp.
And, obv, you want to be on twitter. It’s where all the cool kids are now. Well, I say cool. I mean people like us. And Stephen Fry (@stephenfry). And various comics creators use it a lot (e.g. @jamiesmart or @McKelvie).
@magslhalliday
I’m a huge fan of Last.fm, but you do need to give it a bit of time. The more you use it, the more value you’ll get out of it. Once your profile has enough data, you’ll start discovering great artists you haven’t previously been listening too.