Last.fm Relaunches with New Features

Techcrunch Last.fm Relaunches with New Features Marshall’s got the story over at TechCrunch on Last.fm’s relaunch this morning. Apparently they are offering free mp3s from some independent artists as part of their relaunch which sounds interesting.

I alternate listening between Last.fm and Pandora and think both are pretty good. My only beef with Pandora is that I get the same songs too frequently in my play list. It seems like only a select number of songs are available from each artist. It would be nice to have an option not to repeat a song say for two weeks there.

I like Last.fm as well and like the music it suggests and that I can mark songs as favorites, but I don’t like the fact that I have to use their app to use it. I much prefer accessing Pandora via a url. It’s cleaner and easier.

Either way though you can’t go wrong, especially since both services are free.

I would be interested in hearing how well their stratgies of subsidizing free music in hopes of music sales is working out.

By the way, another *fantastic* resource to keep in mind for digital music is Hype Machine. Hype Machine allows you to search by song, artist, etc. and then goes out and scours the blogosphere finding the mp3s for you on people’s blogs.

Hype Machine is starting to feel an awful lot like Napster did, but with the wrinkle that they are not actually hosting the files. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them shut down at some point — but for now it is an excellent place to go if you want to go download 5 or 6 tracks from the latest Death Cab for Cutie album…

er.. all ethical concerns about piracy aside of course.