Last.fm is a social network, a radio via Internet and also a system of recommendation of music that builds profiles and statistics on musical tastes, based on the data sent by the registered users. Some of these services are payments, but there are still countries where it is still free. On the radio you can select the songs according to the personal preferences (according to an algorithm and the statistics) or other users.
Benefits
A Last.fm user can build a music profile using two methods: listening to his personal music collection in a music application with a Last.fm Audio plugin, or listening to the Last.fm Internet Radio service, usually with the Last.fm player. The songs you hear are added to a record from which you will calculate the bar charts of your favorite artists and songs, as well as the musical recommendations. The user page also shows the most recently heard tracks, and is available via Web services, allowing users to display them in blogs or as signatures in forums.
Last.fm also allows users to manually recommend specific disks to other users (provided that the disk is included in the database).
Perhaps the most commonly used feature of the Last.fm community is the formation of groups of users with something in common (for example, militancy in another Internet forum). Last.fm will generate a profile of groups similar to the profiles of the users, displaying an amalgam of data and displaying lists with the overall tastes of the group.
The musical stamps and artists are helped to promote themselves in Last.fm, because filtering and recommendation are characteristics that make the music will be heard by users who like similar artists. The Last.fm music stock contains more than 100,000 songs. Like many other music sites, they are available on demand preview of 30 seconds of songs, but the purpose is for the music to be heard by users listening to the appropriate radio stations.
Payment accounts
Last.fm offers payment accounts, which amount to $3 (or an equivalent sum in another currency) per month. Once you've heard 30 tracks, the only way to access the service is through a payment account. Some of the extra features that payment users receive are:
• No Ads
• More Radio options
The ability to see recent visitors
Tags
With the relaunch in August of 2005, Last.fm allows labeling of artists by the end user, and tracks to create a physiognomy of the music. Users can scan via tags, but the most important benefit is the labeled Radio, which allows users to listen to music that has been tagged in a certain way. This labeling can be by genre ("garage rock"), humour ("relaxed"), artistic characteristic ("baritone"), or any other form of classification made by the end user ("singers who would like Maria").
Music Player
The music in Last.fm is heard using a player that needs to be downloaded and installed on the computer. The player displays song title, album and artist, along with the album cover if available. There are three buttons, which allow the user to bookmark, skip or veto a song. The bookmark button has an effect on the database of storing two listeners on this track; The veto button ensures that the song will never be played again. Both features refer to the user profile. The song Skip button does not. Other controls include volume, stop and options. The player uses an MP3 stream encoded to 128Kbit/s at 44, 1 khz. Some users criticize that the player has many bugs. Some firewalls affect their ability to transmit.
In the latest version of the Last.fm player, the user can select the ability to use an external player. When this possibility is enabled, the Last.fm player gives the user a local URL, through which the Last.fm music stream is represented and users can open that URL in their preferred media player.
There is another open source player for GNU/Linux platforms called Last Exit that has almost the same features as the official player. In addition, the unofficial version of Last Exit includes the possibility to save the song in MP3 format.
Link of the original post in spanish:
Https://www.plusesmas.com/nuevas_tecnologias/articulos/internet_email/que_es_lastfm/159.html
Translated by: @Chiquillo