I can’t believe its taken me this long to find out about last.fm… or more accurately, I can’t believe its taken this long for someone to talk me into giving it a try.

It all started mid last week when my boss was showing me his account. Aside from looking pretty cool at first glance, the messages that kept ringing in my ears were “free music” and “online radio station”. Seeing as I’m currently lagging a 160gb ext. hard drive to work with me every day, it seemed like an interesting concept.

Now, about 5 days on, I have last.fm (or at least the scrobbling part of it) installed on every Windows/Ubuntu PC I use, its hooked into all my media players and I’ve (apparently) listened to just under 400 songs. Its encouraged me to go through some of my older albums and add metadata to the songs (I always used to play songs directly out of their folders, but most media player libraries (and last.fm) will use the metadata instead of filenames – so I have entire albums listed as “track 1”, “track 2”, etc).

And its reminded me of some songs/bands I couldn’t get enough of during the 90’s but hadn’t even thought about for years – in one nights searching, I managed to reaquaint myself with the entire britpop/indie era all over again! Dodgy, Black Grape, Shed Seven, the Bluetones, the Charlatans and a hell of a load more. My most nostalgic moment came when, while searching for music similar to Shed Seven, Walkaway, the 90’s “Cast” classic, came on. Cast were the first band I ever saw live, and after such a long time since I last heard the album it all came flooding back – suddenly it was like I was there again and I found myself in my room pelting out the lyrics at the top of my voice. What a crazy feeling.

So, fantastic, thanks last.fm for giving me the chance to reconnect with some old favourites! You’ve already made Amazon a sweet £30 in CD sales in the last week (I had to get the cast album! Plus a few others…) and I’m starting to build up a half impressive “radio station” of all the songs I listen to the most. Fantastic. Can’t wait till Ive been on it a few more weeks and the graphs start building up… (yep, I’m a stat whore) 🙂