As last.fm continues to make headlines with increased song offerings, another round of VC, and a rumoured purchase by Viacom, I’m personally impressed by how far they have come since I first joined in January 2006. For me it was a place to track my music habits in the hopes of finding new and exciting bands — as well as wearing my wanna-be hipster catalogue like a button. Just being able to see my weekly top 10 albums, songs, artists, and all time lists was enough for me. Today I have ran across an even more powerful feature, and it is one that I’ve been seeking on and off for some time.
Last.fm has a growing source of concert information localized around the world. They already know my listening habits, and how those habits link with people of similar habits. With this information they are able to provide me a list of upcoming shows, in my area, of bands I listen to or they think I will like. Sure, other sites do this, but last.fm provides it completely automatically. The best part of it all is that I can get this concert information in an iCal feed. What you say? It just means I can plug that feed into my online calendar and know exactly what is going down. As my habits change, and as new bands come Down Under, my concert feed will be updated and adjusted, with no extra work from me.
I use(d) Upcoming.org for this purpose, but the ease and automatic nature of this new last.fm feature will probably convert me as long as they can maintain a high quality database of concert data. Yahoo has an extensive concert database as well, so I am curious as to why this is not used to populate upcoming.org.
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