Last.fm - the social music revolution

About Last.fm

Last.fm is a music service that learns what you love...

Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile
something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who
like what you like - and recommend songs from their music collections
and yours too.

…and as you use Last.fm, you make it better for you and everyone else.

When
you recommend some music to a friend, or you tag it, or you write about
it - even just listening to it - you shift the song's importance on the
site. It'll be recommended to different people, because you've listened
to it. It'll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good.

How it all started…

Back in the 20th Century, Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel
were running an online record label whose mission was to get
independent music out to the people who wanted to hear it. A few years
later, university student Richard Jones
started tracking what he and his friends were listening to on their
computers with a project he called Audioscrobbler. Last.fm brought
these ideas and desires together. Luckily, these days it's about
letting people choose the music themselves - rather than subjecting the
world to Felix's music taste (or we'd all be listening to Elvis and
Japanese surf garage). Last.fm has always been about making music
culture more democratic: everyone listening to music how they want to,
when they want to. Without a middle man making your decisions for you.

…and what we're doing now…

Our
office is in Shoreditch in East London. When we started, the four site
programmers lived in tents on the roof of the office. Now, we occupy a
whole floor on Baches Street, we seem to have someone new on the team
every other week (either here or in New York), and Last.fm is a global
music service available in 12 languages. And in 2007, Last.fm became
part of CBS - so that's another six
thousand or so people helping out. Sometimes we get nostalgic for the
early days. Then we give ourselves a slap around the head and say "Wake up! There are still people who can't get at the music they want the way they want to. So, back to work…"


Link : http://www.last.fm