What Is Last.fm and Should You Use It?

Last.fm lets you stream your favorite music for free while offering great listening, watching, and sharing features. What sets Last.fm apart from other services is that it aims to learn what you like by paying attention to the music you listen to. Then, it uses its extremely unique and advanced "scrobbler" tool to build a detailed profile for you, so it can provide the best personalized musical recommendations.

The platform was a popular social network for music enthusiasts long before other services started popping up. When you sign up, you can build your own Last.fm user profile, then you can go ahead and connect with friends or check out your weekly musical "neighbors." Groups and events are available as well.

With many other popular music streaming services available, it's hard to decide on just one. Giving each a test one is a good way to see how they stack up against each other, but before you do that, here are a few key elements that make Last.fm stand out.

Last.fm focuses on recommending music to you based on your listening habits. That means if you'd rather discover great music on the fly that's relevant to your personal taste instead of spending your time building and customizing your own playlists in a very detailed manner, Last.fm is an excellent choice.

Even though the service seeks to give you more music suggestions, you still have lots of control over what you can listen to on Last.fm. It lets you go in depth with individual bands and artists. You can also stay on top of your listening history, the exploring functionality is preferred by many users over competing services, and you get much more of a community vibe than you do almost anywhere else.

Last.fm's scrobbler feature is usable from the official desktop or mobile apps. Songs you listen to are tracked and automatically added to your music profile.

Last.fm can be integrated with other popular music services, including your iTunes library, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and many others. This means you can also scrobble music you listen to from third-party apps like these when you have Last.fm integrated.

The last big feature Last.fm users really love is its charts feature. Last.fm generates detailed charts and stats based on users' personal tastes every week. There's also a variety of different charts to browse through whenever you want, including Top Tracks, Top Artists, Top Albums, Weekly Top Artists, and Weekly Top Tracks.

Overall, Last.fm is a great service and it's definitely worth using if you need help discovering great music that fits your style. Try it yourself to see how you like it!