Since a couple of hours ago today, Last.fm, everybody's favorite music-based social filtering and recommendation web service, has reopened along with a much needed and waited-for facelift. For those joining the bandwagon right now, Last.fm could be described as a mix between a personalized radio stream and a social networking service (with musical-taste proximity being the "distance" between users).
Besides the now much cleaner and simplified "less-is-more" design, I see that Last.fm has integrated the concept of tags, that is already widespread in the live-content sphere, such as with Technorati's for blogs or Flickr's for photos. Here music tracks can be tagged to reflect the artist / genre or pretty much anything, the service then aggregating the tags altogether. And just like in Flickr where a picture stream representing picture bearing a specific tag can be displayed, here a musical collection of tracks with a specific tag can be streamed to registered users. Seems like an interesting method of expanding one's musical tastes (besides the personalized radio streams), and also a new way of looking at music charts from a more consumer-centric perspective.
Is it the first step towards seeing in the mass media a "Last.fm top 50" alongside the traditional top 50/100 album sales and top digital downloads?
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