Android App Spotlight #2 - Last.fm

Price: Free
Website
AppBrain Link

iPhone and Android users love their free streaming music, and of the many options available for both platforms, Pandora Radio's offering remains the top choice. The radio service utilizes the Music Genome Project, an algorithm that takes a user-entered artist and plays music similar to that artist, with refinements in the resulting songs coming from users "liking" or "not liking" a track. Free music that you like before you know you like it? Sounds good to me.

While I'm not going to fault anyone if Pandora's their app of choice, I prefer the companion app for website Last.fm. When you're on your desktop, phone, or any other devices, and you listen to a song, that information gets uploaded to the site in a process called "scrobbling." Using the information, the website provides recommendations to other artists that you may enjoy, and suggests friends who share the same musical tastes as you. They offer free radio stations like Pandora, too, and since you are constantly giving them new music information, regardless of device, I think their algorithm is more accurate than what's provided by Pandora.

The Android app is very similar to Pandora's - you're presented with a list of channels of artists that you've previously entered into the program, plus you get the ability to stream music specifically from your own library. If you're playing a song in the app, you have the ability to look up the artist's Last.fm profile, see similar artists, check out events with the artist, and take a look at other users who were fans of the song. You can also buy the track on Amazon if you really enjoy it.

If you're playing a song in your stock Android music player, the last.fm scrobbler automatically loads in the background and maintains a presence in the notification bar, allowing you to access the same sort of information from the website as if you were still using the app.

After many months of using the service your profile can be pretty indicative of what music you like, and the theory is that the more you use the service the more accurate your results will be. Even if you're happy with the service Pandora provides, Last.fm offers some great and more in-depth features than Pandora, and is definitely worth checking out. It's Android-only, too, so you can flaunt it in your smug iPhone friend's faces.