Audio­scrob­bler has now been sub­sumed by its cousin last.fm. Aside from the bold new col­ors, there are a lot of addi­tional fea­tures that are really easy to get sucked into. Each user is pro­vided a blog, whose posts appear on that user’s pro­file page and can con­tain links to artists, albums, or tracks that are rel­e­vant to the post. Arists, albums, and tracks can all be tagged with key­words such as “noise” or “indie pop,” and these tags can then be tuned into using the last.fm player. The player has seen a redesign too; rather than being con­trolled with a web inter­face and streamed as an .m3u, a stand-alone pro­gram is required. This isn’t going over well, but I much pre­fer it; it’s cleaner, less buggy, and con­tains a few nice fea­tures such as a chan­nel his­tory to see what you’ve lis­tened to pre­vi­ously. And maybe most impor­tantly, charts are updat­ing almost daily now.

There are many other small improve­ments that I’m not men­tion­ing, but basi­cally I think the whole site is just way, way bet­ter. The new inter­face takes some get­ting used to, and there are some obvi­ous improve­ments that could be made and that I’m sure will. If you haven’t signed up yet, you should. I’m look­ing for­ward to their fur­ther inte­gra­tion with MusicBrainz.