Wanna show the world what music you’re into? Wanna show them how much you love your favourite song? With Last.fm anyone can see exactly how many times you’ve played every song in your music library, they can see what genres you listen to most, and based on your listening habits Last.fm can even make music recommendations for you and invite you to gigs for your favourite artists automatically. So it’s a pretty cool feature.

“Scrobbling” is the processing of your music plays (from iTunes and other music software) which basically tells Last.fm when you listen to any song. You need to have the Last.fm software installed on your machine and be connected to the internet to scrobble your music. If you don’t have internet access or you’ve never connected to Last.fm before all your scrobbling will happen when you next connect to the internet.

Here’s a video that explains the concept because, let’s face it, you probably didn’t read the boring paragraphs above.

I’ve just completed my first year of scrobbling at Last.FM and their log of my stats shows that I’ve played 11,870 tunes in that time. My Top 20 Most Played Artists for August 2008 – August 2009 —>

01. Elvis Presley (276)
02. Kate Bush (252)
03. The Doors (212)
04. Steeleye Span (179)
05. Henry Purcell (154)
06. a-ha (137)
07. Nina Simone (123)
08. Cat Stevens (111)
09. Tori Amos (109)
10. Sandy Denny (103)
11. Tom Waits (102)
12. The White Stripes (100)
13.Creedence Clearwater Revival ( 97)
14. Maddy Prior & The Carnival Band ( 96)
15. The Beatles ( 92)
16. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ( 91)
17. Amazing Blondel ( 83)
18. Nick Drake ( 82)
19. Sinead O’Connor ( 78)
20. Yma Sumac ( 77)

В этом посте я расскажу как подружить эти две сущности

Ставим версию moc 2.5.0 (moc-devel), в Арче это можно сделать через AUR:

$ yaourt -S moc-devel

Разрешаем всем писать в технический каталог lastfmsubmitd:

$ sudo chmod o+rwx /var/spool/lastfm

Для скробблинга понадобится lastfmsubmitd:

$ sudo pacman -Sy lastfmsubmitd

Далее в конфиг moc (~/.moc/config) вписываем следующую строчку:

OnSongChange = "/usr/lib/lastfmsubmitd/lastfmsubmit --artist %a --title %t --length %d --album %b"

А в конфиг lastfmsubmitd (/etc/lastfmsubmitd.conf) информацию об аккаунте на Last.fm:

[account]
user: login
password: password

Запускаем moc и lastfmsubmitd (от рута).

$ sudo /etc/rc.d/lastfmsubmitd start

Скробблим.

Sempre fui um usuário do Lastfm mas agora estou lá como artista. (Clique aqui para acessar a página!!) Isso significa que as pessoas que usam lastfm e ouvirem alguma das minhas músicas (as novas, reorganizadas e ja com as devidas tags) vai estar me ajudando e me dando mais plays, mais ouvintes e tornando minha música mais popular e conhecida no ambiente da internet. Não tenho uma meta exata a alcançar, mas gostaria de sugerir às pessoas que estão baixando o disco para se cadastrarem no lastfm e baixarem o software que faz a contagem das execuções das músicas. Pra quem ainda não tem o CD, basta baixar aqui! Agradeço a todas as pessoas que visitaram, baixaram, ouviram, apreciaram. Gostaria de ter alguma resposta, saber o que o pessoal está achando e sugerir algo para meus próximos albuns. Então, qualquer sugestão, crítica, ou seja lá o que for, pode deixar comentários à vontade. É isso então, gente. Valeu.

Libre.fm is essentially an open source clone of Last.fm’s audioscrobbler.  With Libre.fm you can scrobble  your music play behavior to a central server, where your data is aggregated with all of the other scrobbles and can be used to create charts, recommendations, playlists – all the sorts of things we see at Last.fm. As the name implies, everything about Libre.fm is free. All the Libre.fm code is released under the GNU AGPL.  You can run your own server.  You own your own data.

The Libre project is just getting underway.  Not only is paint is not dry, they’ve only just put down the drop cloth, got the brushes ready and  opened the can.  Right now there’s a minimal scrobbler server (called GNUkebox) that will take anyone’s scrobbles and adds them to a postgres database.  This server is compatible with Last.fm’s so nearly all scrobbling clients will scrobble to Libre.fm.  (Note that to get many clients to work you actually have to modify your /etc/hosts file to redirect outgoing connections that would normally go to post.audioscrobbler.com so that they go to the libre.fm scrobbling machine.  It is  a clever way to get instant support for Libre.fm by lots of clients, but I must admit I feel a bit dirty lying to my computer about where to send the scrobbles.)

Another component of Libre.fm is the web front end (called nixtape) that shows what people are playing, what is popular, artist charts and clouds.  (Imagine what Audioscrobbler.com looked like in 2005).  Here’s my Libre.fm page:

There is already quite a lot of functionality on the web front end – there are (at least minimal) user, artist, album and track pages. However,  there are some critical  missing bits – perhaps most significant of these is the lack of a recommender.   The only discovery tool so far at Libre.fm is the clickable ‘Explore popular artist’ cloud:

Libre.fm has only been live for a few week – but it is already closing in on its millionth scrobble.  As I write this, about 340K tracks have been scrobbled by 2011 users with a total of 920052 plays. (Note that since Libre.fm lets you import your Last.fm listening history,  many of these plays have been previously scrobbled at Last.fm).

When you compare these numbers to Last.fm’s,  Libre.fm’s numbers are very small – but if you consider the very short time that it has been live, these numbers start to look pretty good.  What is even more important is that Libre.fm has already  built a core team of over two dozen developers.   Two dozen developers can write a crazy amount of code in a short time – so I’m expecting to see the gaps in Libre.fm functionality to be filled rather quickly. And as the gaps in functionality are eliminated,  more users will come (especially those users who’ve recently abandoned Last.fm when Last.fm started to charge users that don’t live in the U.S., U.K. or Germany).

I remember way back in 1985 reading this article in Byte magazine about this seemingly crazy guy named Richard Stallman who was creating his own operating system called GNU.  I couldn’t understand why he was doing it.  We already had MS-DOS and Unix (I was using DEC’s Ultrix at the time which was a mighty fine OS). I didn’t think we needed anything else.   But Stallman was on a mission – that mission was to create free software. Software that you were free to run, free to modify, free to distribute.  I was wrong about Stallman.  His set of tools became key parts of Linux and his ideas about ‘CopyLeft’ enabled the  open source movement.

When I first heard about Libre.fm, my reaction was very similar to my reaction back in 1985 to Stallman  – what’s the point?  Last.fm already provides all these services and much more. Last.fm lets you get access to your data via their web services.  Last.fm already has billions of scrobbles from millions of users.  Why do we need another Last.fm?  But this time I’m prepared to be wrong.  Perhaps we don’t really want our data held by one company. Perhaps a community of passionate developers can take the core concept of the audioscrobbler to somewhere new.  Just as Stallman’s crazy idea has changed the way we think about developing software, perhaps Libre.fm is the begining of the next revolution in music discovery.

Update – I asked mattl, founder of libre.fm, what his  motivation for creating libre.fm is. He says there are two prime motivations:

1. Artistic – “I wants to support libre musicians.  To give them a platform where they are the ruling class.”
2. freedom – “give everyone access to their data, so even if they don’t like what we’re  doing with libre music, the software is still free (to them and us)”

Today Last.fm client to S60 phones called Mobbler has been updated to version 0.4.4. New version brings a lot of small but nice changes. Full list of changes is available in Release Notes:

“The left joypad (or plus button) now allows you to do things with the current track like share the artist or track with a friends or add the track to one of your playlists, as well as viewing info about that track. We plan to add and make improvements here in future, like viewing bios etc. You can view your Last.fm data through the View submenu on the options menu. There are a number of lists you can view here and there a a few actions you can do in them. We are planning to add more and more options here in the future. There is now a sleep timer to turn Mobbler off for those of you that like taking our software to bed with them. You can now disable scrobbling so that you can listen to tracks without your friends knowing. You can also select the scrobble percentage that you want to scrobble anywhere between 50% and 100%. Album art is now higher quality and scaled correctly, so you may notice an improvement. Also Mobbler will display album art for music player tracks, if it can find it in the folder of the mp3. If not you can change a setting so that it will try to find it through Last.fm, display it, and save it in the mp3 folder for next time. We have added gestures for those of you that have 3rd edition devices with an accelerometer. So far all you can do is skip to the next track by flicking the phone to the right.”

I really like new, improved UI on my E71 and access to more Last.fm web services. Try it on your phone. As it is non-commercial project please check discovered & reported bugs, then maybe share your observations too at http://code.google.com/p/mobbler/

In the grand tradition of my two previous posts on this topic, I’ve just passed my latest milestone on Last.fm – 10,000 tracks scrobbled! And which song marked this grand occasion? Why, this one:

Robyn – Be Mine!

Since I last wrote about scrobbling milestones in September 2008, Last.fm have significantly expanded their selection of full tracks so you can listen to this one for free at least three times before they cut you off. Or else you can download Spotify (assuming you’re in the UK or Europe, that is) and listen to it all you want. Or you could just buy it I suppose… Hey, it’s a great album.

Well known multi-IM and VoIP application – Fring is now more just an Internet communicator. As I have read it today at All About Symbian, thanks to new a feature of Fring plug-ins it is now possible to make this app also a last.fm streaming radio player. As AAS people are suggesting it is only a basic implementation of popular music service. I definitely agree and my personal opinion is that more popular and desired would be simply starting with scrobbling support (updating your last.fm profile with music played on your player). This feature is currently provided by last.fm client called Mobbler. Oh, talking about Mobbler, it has been updated to version 0.3.4 about three weeks ago. Check it out!

Three years ago I signed up for this music-scrobbling social network called Last.fm. It allows users to record all of the music they listen to, whether it’s on iTunes, Windows Media Player or their iPod. The website sets up their own personal database of recorded music, including top artists and top tracks. Last.fm then recommends music and friends based on their musical tastes. It has become a great way for music lovers to converge and discuss their favorites artists or the discovery of new ones.

The website has also expanded into a music-previewing site as well. Many artists have uploaded full albums that users can stream, full of charge. I’ve recently used this feature to stream Department of Eagles’ limited release from 2007, The Cold Nose. While many of the artists only have previews of their songs, this might change soon when Last.fm begins a subscription service where users will have unlimited plays for streaming tracks.

Anyhow, it’s been three years since I’ve signed up for Last.fm, and I now have 33,694 plays with a total of 482 artists recorded. I’ve also made quite a bit of friends on the site ever since, including people I know IRL and random people on the internet. I actually sold an extra ticket to The Polyphonic Spree concert to a friend I now have on there. I was also just offered an extra ticket to see Andrew Bird and Loney, Dear this Friday in Boston from a friendly stranger, but I cannot go unfortunately. It’s nice to have a community of music lovers who are willing to reach out to strangers for musical gatherings.

Here are my top 10 artists and top 10 tracks for the past three years:

Those aren’t completely representative of my listening trends in the past three months, so I’ll also give you my top 10 for this past week:

The Spotify team has now implemented a feature to allow scrobbling to last.fm, meaning all your songs played with Spotify shows on your last.fm profile.

Still don’t have Spotify? I got 6 more invites left. Leave a comment and I will send you one by e-mail!

What is Spotify?
Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else.

Do you use Last.fm to scrobble music you listen to and love, and also listen to podcasts, but don’t want the podcasts to appear on your Last.fm account as they’re not music? You could disable scrobbling when you’re listening to podcasts, but this is a method that will stop them scrobbling once and for all whether you remember to or not.

Open the Last.fm software by double clicking the icon in the notification area or launching it from Start > All Programs > Last.fm > Last.fm.

In my case I’m listening to Bright Eyes. I’m offline whilst writing this so I don’t get the usual picture and information about the band. Nevertheless I don’t need to be online to change the settings. Click Tools then Options or press Ctrl + O to bring up the Options Window.

Now choose the Scrobbling icon from the left hand pane (you may experience a short delay in loading this screen) and from the directory tree at the bottom locate the directory where you store your podcasts and untick the box next to it.

If you use iTunes, in Windows XP it’s C:\Documents and Settings\[your user name]\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Podcasts and in Windows Vista it’s C:\Users\[your user name]\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Podcasts.

Click Apply then OK, and from now on if you play a podcast Last.fm will not scrobble it.

Oh, and I’m listening to CNET.com’s The 404 which you can find at http://podcasts.cnet.com.

You can find me and what music I’m listening to on Last.fm at http://last.fm/user/aorkwa.

Sarah Hemming reviews are a good and bad thing — they give me a view of the edge of what’s happening theatrically and make me maybe want to go see plays (A Disappearing Number) about things like math that I might not be initially inclined to consider, but as these events are usually happening in London, it’s a hard craving to get.

Watched two of the rentals — Prairie Home Companion was elegiac and slow. Actors off stage aren’t always that interesting and combine that with Altman’s loose actor improvisational character building
tendencies and a Guy Noir who hadn’t any zing (and I love Kevin Kline in comedies– as should anyone who has seem “A Fish Called Wanda”) and it just never clicked. So we switched to “Taking Five” which was a hoot, a great fun romp that made very little sense, couldn’t really ever happen and yet was just fun to watch develop (I loved the peacock costume). The Click Five acted very well for a band and excellent performances were turned in by Alona Tal and Daniella Monet. Have had “Just the Girl” in my head for days now; sadly last.fm doesn’t have that one so I’ll have to dig out my Click Five CD (yes, I have a Click Five CD) and “scrobble” it. (NOTE: Ah, there is the YouTube video version, click on previous link) What exactly is the etymology of scrobbling…Googlesearch, here I click. last.fm might have made it up. Here’s a blog post referencing scrobble and the urban dictionary.

And the rest of my sentences are just turning to goop to wash away in the rain outside; maybe I’ll reedit on the morrow. Very tired day; a little unfocused after vacation. So I’m going to go downstairs, do no math, drink my tea, and then bring Gayle upstairs to fall asleep to the fourth episode of “The Middleman” on my iPod. What else is Monday night for.

And yes, I’m back…guess the time. I’ll make a note..winner gets sketch, DVD or something. Watched The Middleman, fun, review to come…alas, I think it was the last unreviewed episode so now I’ll have to get my comic book guys to order me the graphic novels…there’s so few new cool comic books to order anymore; Friends of Lulu (I spent two years on their Board of Directors) New York List was lamenting DC ending the Minx imprint of graphic novels. I liked the art and the ideas; bought a couple; Clubbing had great art but predictable story, never could bring myself to buy the Plain Janes, but I really enjoyed (Click Five note: “Catch Your Wave” that’s actually the peppy pop blender that caught my ear) ReGifters, tale of love, family and hapkido with a Korean American heroine. Very nice story. Had been thinking about trying the New York Four but never saw it in the store to flip through.

last.fm just rolled “just the girl” when I typed in Click Five…the telepathic powers of the internet – hey telepathetic is a cool word…hmmm, poser telepath who can’t get a happy thought anywhere — can’t get a date is too often done — hmmmmm…maybe time to write that sci fi book…or go back to short stories…HAT HAIR in telepathetic, there we go…

I was going to expand on my “Taking Five” review before I got distracted by a tangent stream. Good collection of characters, nicely done by director Andrew Waller, script that didn’t hit any of the predictable roadblocks I expected (now listening to McFly, too peppy, skipping, Busted kind of fun — “She Wants To Be Like Me” I like a sense of humor. I hope it’s a sense of humor.) It’s nice to see a movie where it’s just sort of a fun scenic trip into someone else’s world — not too demanding and very entertaining. Good band movies are like that — “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help,”; good bad band movies are like that although I can’t think of one at the moment…hmmmm…well, I suppose Help and the first season of the Monkees fits in that category; Purple Rain is a category all to itself; Quadrophenia falls into the good bad category I think — we watched it for mod inspiration (also for mod inspiration Scooter Girl, a comic by Chynna Clugston-Major — we need more Blue Monday) for the second revisit of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and ended up with Rolling Stones records which had to be cut because the Mendelsohn and clarinet fairy line was too strong and we couldn’t switch back and forth without slowing down the pace. For the punk rock “Taming” we’re considering for next summer, Gayle’s excited at the thought of iPod assisted DJing.

And the Shakespeare reference makes this vintage late night lonelypond rambling. Hope you’ve enjoyed your visit.

For those who scrobble with Rhapsody using RhapsodyScrobbler, I’ve felt your pain.  Ever since a Rhapsody update earlier this month, Rhapsody’s Recent Tracks feed has been broken.  Meaning I’m missing 3 weeks of listening history.  And they’ve been slow as molasses in fixing it.  I’m sure it’s because they’re running it through the same rigorous testing that prevents bugs from making it to production….DOH!

Don’t worry, I still love you, Rhapsody…

Anyway, I just discovered via the Rhapsody forums that someone wrote a scrobbler plugin for Rhapsody that integrates with the Rhapsody player itself.  Works like a charm!  The only mixed blessing is it seems to send track info as a track starts playing, rather than waiting until it is completed.  Perhaps an annoyance to those who prefer to scrobble only after listening to a complete song, but I haven’t minded so far.

Enjoy!

Last week one of blog readers – Serg dropped me an e-mail with the link to Mobbler – last.fm client working on S60 devices, including my Nokia E71.

I started testing it and I admit that I haven’t used last.fm earlier at all and now I really enjoy the wonder of last.fm! I thought it would be a good idea to describe Mobbler for E71’s users. I have found out that Mobbler is generally well-known for both last.fm’ and S60’ users. Symbian-Guru called it even The 2nd Greatest S60 Application. I agree this is a really cool application as it has almost all last.fm features like: scrobbling, tagging, describing songs as loved or banned.

Anyway, during my search I have also found other client of last.fm for Symbian S60 working on Nokia E71, too. I’m talking about Strands Social Player which also offers scrobbling, or streaming music to your device. It also has its own social networking tools like linking your friends, etc. The application is maybe a bit more complex but IMHO it has a nicer user interface.

Both applications are definitely worth trying, but please keep it mind that music streaming consumes large amount of data. If you are then using EDGE or UMTS (3G), it will definitely have impact on your phone bill, unless you have a flat data rate. Of course, it also supports WLAN so being at home, in the office, or within a range of public hot spots both Mobbler and Strands could be an entertainment for free.

If you are interested only in mobile Internet radio listening, there is one more alternative. Check Nokia’s Internet Radio which allows listening to your favorite radio stations broadcasting online. This application has a nice, smooth GUI and also works using both packet transmission (EDGE or UMTS) and WLAN.

That’s it, now start enjoying the music!

A landmark event! Earlier today I listened to my 5,000th track on Last.fm:

Feist – The Water

And what a fittingly awesome tune to mark the occasion! My last major Last.fm landmark was back in January, at which point I’d listened to 1,000 tracks.

Interestingly, between the time I passed the 5,000 mark this morning and the time of writing this, Last.fm has altered the way it displays your track count. It now looks a little like an old-school tape deck counter.

Nice touch!

Additionally, when you hover over the count it tells you your average number of tracks per day. Mine currently stands at 13 per day. Not bad – equivalent to roughly one album’s worth of songs consumed every day. But could do better! Actually though, this data is skewed because I didn’t really use Last.fm much for the first couple of months back when I installed it. Also, since January I’ve been listening to a lot more music!

If, like me, you’re a stats-fiend and you also love Last.fm, you could do worse than checking out the Last.fm Stats group! This includes links to all sorts of tag cloud generators and eclectic music/open-mindedness calculators based on your listening history in Last.fm.

See you back here in about 8 months when I hit the 10K mark. By my calculations, I’ll need to up my listening game to an average of just 20.5 tracks per day to reach this within 8 months.

Continuing to Scrobble ([LOOK --->] I’m so delighted with this natty neologism that I’ve insisted on honouring it with capitalisation) at Last.fm, I am currently playing the Patsy Cline track “Crazy” and NOT thinking about Seal or Bryan Hyland, at all, (at all)……

The asscociated Last.fm software applet gives you quick access to artist information and, from that, I’ve learned how brief her life was. It was cut short by an aircraft accident. Curiously, the singer had previously survived a near-fatal automobile smash.

Apparently I have just become the first person to Scrobble Mark Perreault at Last.fm…..this follows me gettin’ at Jill Carole as player one.

Type: Music

Cost: Free

Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10

Review: For this app to have any use, you need to have a Last.FM account and preferably have also installed the desktop app and used it to track your music listening history for a while (or you can sync your iPod with the website).  Last.Fm is basically a music scrobbling service which watches what type of music you listen to and can play back custom radio stations based on this information.  In the iPod Touch/iPhone version of the app you have a couple options of what you want to do.  You can either Start a new station by typing in a band name or tag, play the My Library station which plays music you normally listen to, Neighbour Radio which plays what it wants to based on your music history and finally Recommended Radio which plays it recommendations of songs/bands you might like based on your music history.  From the opening screen you can also view stations your have recently listened to, the charts screen which allows you to view your Top Artists, Top Albums, Top Tracks and Recently Played, your upcoming events you will be attending (set via the website), and Friends your might have added.  Once you actually start playing a station a music screen will come up (second screenshot) and give you helpful options such as selecting the bands bio and similar artists, as well as events which the band will be playing at.  Under the more menu you can also find the band’s top listeners and tags.  Only major disadvantage of this app is that it can’t be used in the background to listen to your radio (thanks to Apple).

Screenshots:

Verdict: This app is great for those who already have a Last.FM account and have already built up a history of the music they listen to, but for others who don’t already meet the criteria it will take a while to setup and get working to it’s full potential.  Try it out if you have some free time or already have an account.

Link: Last.FM

I have only recently started using Last.fm…as with most things I sign up to stuff then need the nudge to actually start using it.  I have to say it is one of the better sites out there for finding independent/obscure artists and their ‘Similar Artists’ links can sometimes be right on the button- and herein lies the problem!   I have always been one to follow links…which is why I nearly time myself when I go into Imdb since it could easily be a few hours before I come out of that site.

I recently checked out some of the similar artists to the fabulous Ane Brun…a click brought me to Anna Ternheim…one more for Hello Saferide…at which stage I don’t which way I clicked but all of a sudden I was inundated with some other great artists:  Stina Nordenstam, Emiliana Torrini, El Perro Del Mar, Anja Garabek, Frida Hyvönen and Britta Persson.

There was actually a lot more clicking going on since I have only listed the ones I liked…quite a few more that weren’t but you don’t know until you check them out!  (Will post on some of them when I get the time)  Clicking on the Recommended link can also bring the clicking addiction on but thankfully whenever I do click there I have heard of most of the groups so I don’t spend too long there.

The scrobbling feature on LastFm is quite nifty as well since you can set up a plugin to let the site know what you have been playing and display it for all and sundry to see.  Unfortunately this only shows what I have been listening to on the laptop in Windows Media Player and not what I have been streaming from blogs/MySpace/YouTube,  the tunes from the Mp3 player or the computer in work, and lastly the outdated  technology of the hi-fi!  So just to get my RSI screaming at me- you can follow the links of what your friends have been listening to and if you click on the ‘Neighbors’ link you can find other users with similar musical tastes and see what they have been listening to as well!

I do have a few techie quibles with Last.fm- I can never seem to stream the music from the online players for the artist, any emails over whatever specified buffer will auto-reply without you typing anything, and the scrobbler sometimes has problems connecting with the site.

However the whole premise of the site in all its clickified glory is a great tool in finding new music and finding other people with similar tastes.  So get clicking!

]]> http://tlenze.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/finding-fabulous-music/ Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:06:49 +0000 Troy Lenze http://tlenze.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/finding-fabulous-music/

In honor of a conversation we had at my birthday party, I am going to list some of the music discovery sites and programs I use.

1. First up is Pandora Radio.  Enter a song or artist and it plays songs like those.  You can give a thumbs-up and thumbs-down to a song to help it select better songs.  The drawback to Pandora is that it does not have a lot of mainstream music.  Most of it is obscure and/or independent.  For some this is a feature, but I like a lot of mainstream music.
2. Another favorite of mine is Last.FM.  You download a program that tells Last.FM what music you play, called “scrobbling.”  Then it takes that information and builds a station for you, recommends music and recommends stations of people with similar music tastes.  It also lets you choose friends and listen to their channels.  I am tlenze, by the way.  Feel free to add me.
3. Musicovery is also really neat.  No need to download anything.  You choose genres, energetic or calm and dark or positive.  The nice thing about this service is that it shows you a map of the songs it will play you.  That way you can ban songs before you actually have to hear them, unlike Pandora and Last.FM.

All three of these services let you buy the songs you hear in a click or two.  Give them a try.