I’ve been trying to listen to a little more music recently, and find new artists and songs. I signed up yesterday at Last.fm. It is a social music site. Basically it recommends music based on your listening habits and according to what others on the site with similar tastes listen to. They’ve got a bit of software to download, although you don’t have to, and that syncs with their website and communicates what you are listening to with iTunes. Eventually it builds up enough of a history that it makes recommendations of other music it thinks you might like.

But that’s not all it does. You can also type in an artist and it will play a song by them, but then it will keep going playing songs of a similar or related type. The idea is that you will discover something new.

And finally there is the social aspect. You can check and see what other users are listening to, and as you add friends you can see what they are listening to and communicate about what you like and share songs with each other and so forth.

It is a neat idea. I’ve got to spend more time playing with it to see how good a job it does at making recommendations, but I already had some fun by just typing in the word “blues” and seeing what songs it started playing for me. I did already dump my iTunes play history into it, but I haven’t yet got it sorted out with my iPod.