Description – Listen to more than 5 million tracks for free with Last.fm on your iPhone.

Developer – Last.fm

Price – Free – iTunes Link

Simply insert your favourite artist, tag or user and the Last.fm app will produce a personal radio station full of similar artists commercial free. When you find artists that you like there is a lot of useful features that allow you to find out more. The app has a smooth finish and an easy to use interface.
Last.fm
It includes some of the Last.fm classic tools such as Love or Ban. You’re able to look at the artists Bio, which I always like to read a bit of background info from my favourite artists. If the artist is on tour then a tab notifies you and allows you to check out tour dates, plus you can state whether or not you are attending in your events calendar within the application. Once the event is in the calendar, you can check the address of the venue and the app can take you to Google maps to pinpoint the location; One of my favourite attributes and useful for when you’re out and about and can’t find the venue.

The app will still stream music in 3G areas without the requirement for a wireless connection. This is quite a nice touch as it means you can use the app pretty much anywhere. Any less than a 3G connection and you will find the app is buffering every ten seconds. Something that I really like about the app is that you can easily look at your top played artists, albums, tracks, recently played and even lets you check out your friends profiles and check out your common artists.

Last.fm have done a great job with this app but I do feel there are some downsides that I should mention. Something that I find really frustrating about the app is when I am thinking of an artist that I have just heard on the radio for example, and I now want to find out some information about that artist; there isn’t anyway to do that with this app. This is something that is really simple to do on the Last.fm website and I didn’t think it would be too difficult to integrate into the Last.fm app.

“Insufficient Content, There is not enough content available to play this station. Please try another Station”

This is a comment that comes up too often for me to not mention it. When searching an artist in the station, I can get this message several times before it realises that it can find some similar artists for a particular station.

Pros

  • Free
  • Really beautiful finish
  • Wonderful to use when your out and about
  • A great tool for discovering new artists
  • A major edition to what the iPhone/Touch has to offer
  • Commercial free

Cons

  • Unable to search a specific artist of interest to find out more about them
  • Still needs to have some bug fixes

Verdict

Overall I really like this app and find myself looking for new music a lot more than I used to when I just had Last.fm on my computer. Considering that the Last.fm app is free, it really is worth having a play with as it does have some useful features and is fantastic for discovering new music.