I subscribed to London-based Last.fm yesterday - "a free service that tracks your musical taste, finds similar users, and provides musical recommendations and free personalised radio".

Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler system, a music engine based on a massive collection of Music Profiles. Each music profile belongs to one person, and describes their taste in music. Last.fm uses these music profiles to make personalized recommendations, match you up with people who like similar music, and generate custom radio stations for each person.

After configuring WinAMP with their Audioscrobbler plugin (which submits to their database and then tracks your music listening habits and calculates relationships and recommendations), I got listening to some tracks to test it out. Here's my page.

And here's Hoff's page (one of the staff ;) to give you a better idea of how it works, or you can simply take the tour for a brief introduction.

You need to listen to over 300 songs before you can become properly involved in the network, but so far I'm just enjoying the novelty. Exploring music relationships is especially fun - a search for Taking Back Sunday for example, returned a list of 97 artists, many of which I'm not familiar with. I previously used Amazon's recommendations and more recently purevolume to get a similar list, but they don't even begin to compare.

Check out the Charts to see what the network is listening to each week. The Beatles are currently on top followed closely by Radiohead and Coldplay. Sorry for yooou, 50 cent/etc. fans! There are also charts for each country - check out South Africa, with "locals" Seether coming in at #11.

There do appear to be some issues with their matching algorithms/whatever though, where if different users name their track data differently then duplicates appear in the lists. Hopefully this will improve over time. Their FAQ provides some insight into their relationship with MusicBrainz - "a community music metadatabase moderated by its users to ensure the meta-data is free from errors".

It's everything I loved about Flickr, but for music. And their logo is pretty sexy. Oh, and if you're in London, they're hiring! Dream office job... if there ever was such a thing. Meh.