What Is Last.fm and Should You Use It?

Last.fm allows you to stream music for free while combining your favorite music with great listening, watching and sharing features too. 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, and then uses its extremely unique and advanced "scrobbler" tool to build a detailed profile for you so that it can provide the best personalized musical recommendations.

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

With the other popular choices, there are out there in terms of music streaming services, it's hard to decide on just one. The best way would be to give each one a test run to seek how they stack up against each other, but before you do that, here are a few key elements worth knowing about that make Last.fm stand out.

Firstly, Last.fm puts a big focus on recommending music to you based on your listening habits. That means that 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, then Last.fm is an excellent choice.

Even though the service is meant to help 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 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 can be used from the official desktop or mobile apps. Music you listen to will then be 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 that you can also scrobble music you listen to from third-party apps like these when you have Last.fm integrated.

The last big feature that Last.fm users tend to 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, and Top Albums, Weekly Top Artists and Weekly Top Tracks.

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Overall, Last.fm is a great music 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!

Updated by Elise Moreau