Music streaming and social community Last.fm has redesigned for a more mature experience, adding more integration and ubiquity across a variety of devices. Ars Technica put on some headphones and rocked out with some of the new features.

Now sporting a much more refined and organized layout, Last.fm is finally filling its shoes as part of CBS' transition to becoming an "audience company" and further extending its reach onto the web. The network purchased Last.fm in May 2007 for $280 million. Since then, Last.fm has introduced significant new features like music streaming from the four major labels—never mind that little squabble with Warner—and a music video initiative.

Last.fm became a bit more interesting some time ago with the introduction of a plug-in for various software like iTunes and Windows Media Player which "scrobbles" a list of the artists and songs you play up to your Last.fm account (not the files themselves). Combined with adding friends and the ability to purchase songs found on the sites at popular digital outlets like Amazon and iTunes Store, Last.fm has morphed into a convenient, free, one-stop social networking shop for exchanging music tastes, discovering new tracks, and keeping up with one's favorite artists.





No fair making fun of our taste in music



Although some long-time fans are upset (scroll down to the comments) with the redesign, we think Last.fm has gained a much more pleasant layout and new features that make it far easiest and faster to begin discovering new music you might like. While you can still install its plug-in to "scrobble" music and harness Last.fm's auto-recommendation system, you can now simply search for artists and click "add to library" to begin building a music profile and find new music.

While listening to any song with Last.fm's streaming player, the song can easily be added to your library to once again keep building a profile and give the site's recommendation engine more preferred tunes to crunch on. The new features are pleasantly convenient: ee found tracks from both pop and indie artists that we've already added to our shopping carts, and being able to stream the entirety of (most) recommended tracks while we're a thousand miles away from our main iTunes library is an appreciated bonus. Last.fm has also improved the sheer speed of its recommendation system so recommended artists appear "in seconds instead of weeks," so the site takes on the responsiveness of talking to an encyclopedic music store employee instead of trading CDs in the mail.

During our testing today, Last.fm frequently took a while to deliver new pages, and streams occasionally broke. It's understandable in a way since the site is probably experiencing higher-than-average traffic because of the buzz. Considering that sites with heavier media to move like YouTube have yet to experience a memorable hiccup, though, we expect a little more out of CBS since Last.fm is such a big push for the company.

In addition to refreshing its site today, Last.fm is branching out into mobiles phones and the living room. Now that the iPhone and iPod touch can officially run third-party applications, Last.fm launched a free native app that can stream any of the 5+ million songs from its library, recommend new songs, and give users access to their favorite artists and tracks. The app's UI is obviously inspired by Apple's iPod application, and it provides straightforward access to Last.fm's key areas and controls, such as banning a recommended track and a list of events from one's favorite artists. Unfortunately, due to Apple's restriction of not allowing applications to run in the background, you can't start Last.fm's iPhone app and do something else like you can with the built-in iPod app. Considering how quickly streaming music like this could gobble up an iPhone's battery while on-the-go, though, we aren't too broken up about it.

In the living room, Last.fm has partnered with Logitech to bring its services to the gadget company's line of Squeezebox wireless music streaming players. Viewers of the CBS show Swingtown can also now visit last.fm/swingtown during and after each episode to listen to a free, on-demand playlist of songs featured from the show.