With Last.fm, music fans have found a place to congregate and share musical tastes. The Last.fm player places the “social music revolution” onto your desktop, giving you access to thousands of tracks from all musical genres.

The beauty of the application is that it encourages you to find similar artists to the ones you’re accustomed to and also pushes you to interact with users who share the same tastes. Search results appear as a tag cloud, with the biggest elements being the most popular. With thousands of songs available on Last.fm, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll listen to the same thing twice. The player is streaming and you’ll have to be connected to the internet and have a Last.fm account for it to work.

Although slightly bulky, the Last.fm player interface is sleek and accessible. We like the shiny control icons and the “now playing” window. This is where you’ll find all artist information like album cover, a small description of the artist, related tags and artists and top listeners. The menu bar on the left includes your recently played tracks, recently loved and recently banned, although to listen to these you’ll need to upgrade your Last.fm account (€2.50/month). The last 10 stations you’ve listened to are automatically saved in your history file.

The social experience is central to Last.fm and becomes pretty addictive. By listening to tracks you create a profile of yourself, the music you listen to and the artists you like. Last.fm then connects you to other users that have similar tastes, whom it calls neighbours. In the Last.fm player, you can connect to neighbours' stations and listen to their tunes. The lists of the friends you made on Last.fm will also appear in your player. If you have the Audioscrobbler plug-in installed, Last.fm can also track all the songs you play in your favourite desktop music app (like iTunes) and connect you with even more neighbours.

Most of us here at Softonic have Last.fm connected all day, simply because it doesn’t require you to have your own music library, it’s free and provides an endless flow of new tunes. In line with modern evolutions in online music, this web music application mixes streaming and social tools to give you an exciting music player. No music fan with access to Internet should be caught dead without it.