Last.fm: Music Enthusiast's Best Friend

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Last.fm is a website that has been around since 2002 and that originally offered an online radio streaming service, listening history tracking, and recommendations based off of your listening history. Nowadays, it has dropped the radio streaming service in favor of "scrobbles" or plays and gives you recommendations. This has always been considered the best feature of the website with some users even having been scrobbling for over 10 years. Not only does it track your music data, it also gives you great recommendations based on that data.

I believe this tool is perfect for anyone who is truly interested in not just music but music discovery. I've found some artists I've come to really enjoy on this platform such as Arrested Youth, Hobo Johnson, and many more. The website has an array of features that allows you to easily discover music. For example, you can browse to the homepage where it gives you a series of recommendation based on your recent listening history. But perhaps the best music discovery system I've seen is the "Neighbours" feature. This feature allows you to look at people whose taste is similar and look through the artists, songs, and albums that they like.
For those who are not interested in music discovery, one feature that people are very interested in as evidenced by the virality of Spotify Wrapped is music tracking/data. While Spotify Wraped is great, it's a marketing tool. Last.fm allows you to see more advanced statistics about your music listening habits and thanks to its very dedicated fanbase there are many third party tools that allow you to see even more statistics such as how mainstream your taste is. The platform also allows you to share and view your music taste with your friends by allowing you to add your friends and compete with them every week for the top of the scrobble leaderboard. This article was not sponsored or endorsed by last.fm in any way, I just truly think it's a great tool.

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