Don't Be A N00b: Find free music you really want

Don't: listen to the radio and write down songs you like.

Do: use last.fm.

According to Wikipedia last.fm is the largest social music community in the world with 15 million active users. Create a free account and download the scrobbling plugin. The software sends the title and artist of every song (CD, MP3, WMA, whatever) you play to last.fm where it's logged with your account. Going to your dashboard gives you a history of each track you listened to, when you listened to it, what you listened to next and if you loved it or not. You can flag a song as "Love it" which puts it in a special category you can pull up later.

In addition to logging the listens and loves last.fm allows you to tag tracks, albums and artists. I use "seen live" and "seattle band" as my favorite tags so I can keep track of concerts I've been to and new local bands I haven't seen yet.

Once you've built a substantial profile of listens the recommendation engine will find songs it thinks you would like. This is accomplished by finding groups that have been described as similar and scanning the playlists of other users that appear "near" to you in taste. Your last.fm neighbors are people who like what you like.

The radio feature streams music from your neighbors playlists or random tracks that have been recommended to you. Only music that has been posted by artists or included by the last.fm team is streamable. It's like any online radio station except that you can tune in to custom stations based on your previous interests or things you've never heard before.

View my last.fm profile.