And I LOVE the idea of using it as a backup.. just need to leave the computer on for… er… 62 days to play through every track and I’ll be sorted… perhaps not.

Mind you, the iTunes library file does that without having to play every track..

All I really need is for a way to tag certain tracks as “Do not last.fm”. Why? because my wife uses the computer to listen to music on the odd occassion, and whilst I don’t MIND Girls Aloud now and then, or Elvis, or George Michael… I’d really rather my Last.fm account was just MY songs. A minor bugbear.

I think you could be onto something there. I had a hard drive crash a while back (nothing serious – forgot to unplug a firewire drive before updating OSX) and was more concerned about getting screenshots from iTunes as to what was on there that hadn’t been backed up than rescuing the actual files. CDs can be ripped, tracks downloaded and at the end of the day I’m not going to miss a decent chunk of it as there’s always new stuff out there. The data let me decide what was worth replacing.

I also think of it as a free music backup tool, I’m beggining to think my library data is more important than any actual mp3 files. So if my drive crashed tomorrow then I’d look to last.fm to find out what to get. Files can easily be replaced but the names of obscure remixes are really important.

Reduce the dosage and I’m sure the pain will decrease.

I’m a relatively recent Last.fm convert, but I have to say that it’s probably my favourite Web 2.0 thing. I’ve used Flickr for considerably longer, but it hasn’t given me as much pleasure. I’ve written about Twitter today, but that’s only because it’s a much simpler proposition and I feel that I’ve “got” it fairly quickly. I’m still exploring Last.fm and I’m considering getting a subscription.

What I’m enjoying most about the service is twofold:

1 – a record of what I’m really listening to, rather than what I think I’m listening to. That might sound odd, but the two are often surprisingly different.

1 – visibility of what friends are listening to without specifically having to have “music conversations” (and also, as above, visibility of what friends are really listening to, etc).

And yeah, it reminds me a lot of Amazon. For several years around the turn of the century, I spent two or three hours a day browsing around Amazon, listening to sound samples and following “if you liked this…” recommendations.

If someone put a gun to my head and said that I could only surf one internet site from now onwards and I had to make a choice there and then, I still think it’d be Amazon.