Last.FM

I've stumbled upon another Internet classical music broadcasting system that seems pretty good, Last.FM. I haven't figured out all of its capabilities yet, but I does seem to have a lot of interesting music fitting my tastes. The pieces tend to be relatively short though I'm now listening to Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" which is 52 minutes long. The music is broadcast by a player imbedded within the Last.FM HTML page, though there are other ways to listen. If you go away from the Last.FM page you are listening to you loose the music, but if you pop into another Firefox tab, the playing continues. There is a way to use the Last.FM player in Linux, but the installation is by configuring and compiling from a tar ball. I tried installing it, but it complained about my system and wouldn't compile. Their in-page player buffers the music, so the occasional breaks I was hearing on Live365 and ShoutCast, caused by Comcast's router connectivity issues, don't appear as obvious. But if you inadvertently go to the Last.FM page playing the music and follow a link from there your music is gone.

Last.FM has "stations" which appear to be collections of similarly catalogued music. At first glance their classical listings aren't all that deep, but I've found their contemporary classical selections to be fairly extensive. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising given the nature of the site and the content.

Is the new "contemporary classical" music any good? I'm now listening to "The Storm" by Wojciech Kilar. Last.FM has a succinct biography of the composer being played, a dynamic Web 2.0 ajax feature. Kilar is a contemporary Polish composer mentioned along-side Pendereski and Gorecki. In checking on FM broadcasts, a Kilar composition was broadcast 4 times on 3 different stations over the last 5 years. The FM radio is not the way to get exposed to his music it seems.