Audioscrobbler has now been subsumed by its cousin last.fm. Aside from the bold new colors, there are a lot of additional features that are really easy to get sucked into. Each user is provided a blog, whose posts appear on that user’s profile page and can contain links to artists, albums, or tracks that are relevant to the post. Arists, albums, and tracks can all be tagged with keywords such as “noise” or “indie pop,” and these tags can then be tuned into using the last.fm player. The player has seen a redesign too; rather than being controlled with a web interface and streamed as an .m3u, a stand-alone program is required. This isn’t going over well, but I much prefer it; it’s cleaner, less buggy, and contains a few nice features such as a channel history to see what you’ve listened to previously. And maybe most importantly, charts are updating almost daily now.
There are many other small improvements that I’m not mentioning, but basically I think the whole site is just way, way better. The new interface takes some getting used to, and there are some obvious improvements that could be made and that I’m sure will. If you haven’t signed up yet, you should. I’m looking forward to their further integration with MusicBrainz.