Here are some examples of the Last.fm plug-ins.

My recently played songs:

My all time favorite artists:

My favorite tracks from this week:

Now I would love to show you the Pandora site plug-in. However, it seems as though only US residents are currently allowed to sign up for an account. Without an account I can not use the site plug-in. They are currently working on licensing the music for international use though, so maybe one day soon.

In this installment I’m going to show you a ridiculous web application called Pandora that was created by the Music Genome Project. What is Pandora then? Well think of it as your own personal radio station that only plays music that you like! Wouldn’t that be nice? Well Pandora is the closest anything has come to just that. The advantage to Pandora over a site like AllMusic.com is you get to go by the sound of the music, not just the name of a band or song.

So how does it work?
When you visit Pandora it asks you for the name of an artist or the name of a song. For example I gave it the name Eric Clapton. If Pandora has music from that artist in its database it will start by playing a song from them. After that song is done playing Pandora will pick another artist who has a similar musical, lyrical, and instrumental style to the first artist you chose.

After playing I’m Tore down by Clapton for me, Pandora played a live version of Hotel California by the eagles. For each song Pandora plays you have several options that include:

• Why did you play this song – a list of the qualities the song has which made Pandora choose it
• Make a new station from this song – create a station which will play songs similar to this one
• Buy this song from iTunes – so you can add it to your personal collection
• Buy this album from Amazon – so you can own the album for your personal collection
• I like it – will teach Pandora to play more songs like this one on this station
• I don’t like it – will teach Pandora not to play more songs like this one on this station
• Add to your favorites page – adds the song to a list of your favorite songs for later

Pandora (for its own monetary gain I’m sure) gives you direct access to iTunes and Amazon so you can buy any of the music you like. I think this is a really great feature that any music database should have.

Pandora allows you to create a few stations and play around with it but to be able to get the full experience it’s a good idea to register. If you register you can login from any computer and pull up your stations and favorites lists.

If you don’t know about Pandora you should head over and give it a shot. If anything its fun to play with for a while.

For other sites you can use to find new music check out my other post about AllMusic.com.