Today I have finally discovered Last.FM. It is an internet radio service with a large collection of artists and music.

In the past, I have used music successfully to help myself concentrate whenever I wanted to study. At that time, I used the now defunct Pandora Radio (not really defunct, but unusable outside the U.S., which in practice means the same to me).

I think I have said it in previous posts, but I was having difficulty recently concentrating on my current tasks in my research. Today, surfing around, I stumbled on last.fm – not exactly a new website, but I never used it before.

My first contact was positive. Write in Beethoven in the search box, click play – there you go, a nice “Beethoven Radio”. Creating a profile to make a more personalized radio is a bit less intuitive, though – lots of clicks to add an artist to your profile, and you can’t play your own library until you have 15 artists. Of course, you could only listen enough reccomendations to fill up the quota and have your own library. That said, I was quite content with the automatic reccomendations he gave me when I assembled my study set.

The problem was when I tried to separate my study set and my personal set. I like to listen to instrumental music when I’m studying. But when I’m not, I have a more varied musical taste. In Pandora, I could set up a number of different radios, but it seems that last.FM only allows each user one radio station. Also, the reccomendation system can’t seem to find a good “middle ground” between multiple different music styles. After making another radio station with a few MPB artists and a few Rock artists, the reccomendation after a while started sending me only MPB songs, and no rock songs. Having a more varied sample would be nice.

Now, it seems that this can be circumvented by creating multiple users, each dedicated to a different style. I’m not sure if that is the best solution, though, and I’m willing to hear more.