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Exactly a year ago today, I signed up for a free account on the music website Last.fm, little realising quite how much it (and later also Spotify) would revolutionise my music-listening habits.
I was first introduced to Last.fm a year or so earlier, when my brother mentioned it to me. I took a quick look but mistakenly understood it to be merely a service for broadcasting information about the music you were listening to. At the time, I did virtually all my home listening from non-networked media (principally CDs on my hi-fi system) and the bulk of my work-time listening (while I worked, obviously!) from a Mac on which I didn't have administrative rights to install the software that Last.fm seemed to require. Therefore, I decided that Last.fm didn't have anything to offer me and looked no further at it.
Then, last July, I took a short trip to Hungary with some friends, one of whom used Last.fm from his laptop. Seeing it in action, I realised that it offered the potential to explore a vast array of music from all around the world, including lots of stuff that would be very difficult to locate on CD or which I wouldn't necessarily want to listen to more than once or twice. Although Last.fm does have some premium services available, the free services have been plenty to keep my ears occupied for the last year.
Some time later, I was directed towards Spotify, which also contains a wide selection of music, including quite a lot that isn't available directly at Last.fm. It is easy to set up Spotify to upload your listening data to Last.fm (the same is true, in fact, of many media players for listening to local music collections). Unlike Last.fm, the free version of Spotify lets you set up your own playlists. I find this a lot more convenient than playing the tracks I want to hear one at a time and more satisfying than just listening to a random stream of tracks via the Last.fm radio stations, so I tend to use Spotify for most of my day-to-day listening. I have also copied a reasonable portion of my CD collection on to my computer so that I can put together my own playlists and keep a record of what I have been listening to, although I still do use my CD player when I don't have the computer switched on.
In the past year, I have listened to a much greater range of music than ever before, and have come across some excellent musicians that I might never have heard about, or at least not had a chance to listen to, otherwise. Some of my highlights are a Flemish vocal trio called Laïs (who have overtaken J. S. Bach to reside in the top spot on my Last.fm listening chart, with over 400 plays in the last year), a Finnish band called Loituma (I'm particularly fond of their tune Ievan Polkka) and an Australian singer called Butterfly Boucher. I've also been able to listen more widely to the repertoire of many artists that I've previously only heard in a narrower context; for instance the Norwegian fiddler Annbjørg Lien (I have had two of her albums for quite a while but have been able to listen to several others on Spotify) and jazz musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus (again, I have several of their albums but I can now listen to a much wider selection of their music).
I've no idea what new technology will turn up next to revolutionise the way I listen to music but it seems likely that for the near future I'll continue to do a lot of listening with Last.fm and Spotify, and continue to expand my musical horizons as I explore the vast riches of recorded music.
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