Last FM Rocks

I watched The Gadget Show on Five tonight. Are you surprised? They had quite a fun feature where they tried to wean one of the presenters off his Apple habit by doing things like giving him an electric shock whenever his iphone was slower than the competition.

One of the things that came out of this was a mention for last.fm as a replacement for iTunes, the Apple music store. This went down a storm with the Apple lover, and so I took a look myself.

Turns out it is wonderful. If you fancy a completely free, streamed service that will send you your favourite tunes to a PC or mobile device (the iPhone client is lovely) then you would be bonkers not to take a look.

You calibrate it by giving a few of your favourite artists and then it either plays tracks from them or suggests others you might like. All for free. If you actually want to buy any of the tracks that you are hearing you can press a button and download them there and then. The new iTunes has a feature called Genius that works like this, but it either plays your own music or suggests things that you can buy.  Last fm on the other hand gives you a free soundtrack for your life anywhere you can get a network connection, including 3G and even Edge (although I guess the quality won't be the best on low bandwidth connections).

Actually, while I'm mentioning amazing things to do with iPhones, I should really give a shout out to Shazam (you can get it for other platforms too).  It is a free application that tells you what music is playing on the radio. Let the program listen to a snatch of the song and it will go online and then more often than not come back with full details. It is truly amazing, and I've no idea how it works.