Wired blogs a piece about Internet radio station Last.FM

Last.fm is an online radio site — but with a twist. It works hand-in-hand with Audioscrobbler, a small software plug-in that works with popular software music players like Winamp and iTunes. The plug-in scrutinizes the music files on users’ computers and sends the information to a server. From that, Last.fm creates a personalized Internet radio station based on each user’s taste.

Internet Radio promises to be highly complimentary to our MP3 players and/or phones, when we are always connected via 3G or wi-fi. It means that we’ll all be able to carry round 24/7 our own digital music channel, personalised to our tastes.

I can’t see it replacing ownership of recorded music, but it’s a great way to sample other music - one of the biggest challenges faced by the music industry.

Last.FM is fully legal and the really clever part is

In addition, Last.fm lets users sample friends’ musical choices. Listeners can “ban” friends’ songs they don’t like and designate others they love, and, in that way, diversify their musical preferences.

Meaning that until the technology is available to really predict what you like, you can use the next best thing - a free human recommender, or sneezer, as Seth Godin calls them.

Cool beans.