Last.fm

I've been playing about with Last.fm over the last few weeks. The basic concept is you enable your music player with an Audioscrobbler plugin which transmits meta-data^* about each song played to their servers. From this Last.fm can build a profile of your listening habits. From this data it can do a number of things including recommend artists you may like based on the listening habits of people like yourself. What I've been using most is the radio player (open source!) which will play stations that can either be recommended stuff or based on a particular "tag". A simple subscription (?18 for the year) expands the number of radio stations you can listen to including your personal station. Its quite cool having an internet radio station thats so well tailored to your listening habits that also introduces you to new music. If any of the music it does throw at you is really not to your taste you can always skip/ban it and it won't assault your ears again. Quite a lot of the tunes its recommended have been things I've caught in the past but didn't know who it was by or from what album. Luckily this is all digital now so finding out who you liked is so simple. Must resist the urge to buy more CD's :-)

^*Andy did point out this sharing of data is a bit at odds with my general opposition to exposing too much personal data on the 'net. After all I still buy a lot of stuff from the supermarket in cash for this very reason. However for music I feel the exception is warranted as its one of those things I like to discuss and share with people. Besides I did read the privacy policy which gets good marks for clarity.