There are several ways to listen to music on Last.fm: via the Radio (where available), as previews, and directly from our artists and labels.
Radio
There are lots of radio stations on Last.fm which allow you to tune into an endless variety of music streams, whatever you’re interested in. A simple overview of the different types of stations can be found here.
There are for example artist stations such as “Radiohead Radio” or global tag stations such as “Rock Radio” which will play you music related to whatever artist or tag (e.g. a genre) you choose. You can simply tune into a station here or click the radio buttons wherever you see them on the site, and just start listening to some stations that sound interesting to you.
If you have your own user profile, you have your Library which is basically all the music you’ve listened to and added to your profile, and you can listen to all this music with your personal Library radio station.
Previews
While browsing the site, you’ll see lots of artists and tracks. Some of them have a little play icon next to their name, which will allow you to listen to them as 30 second previews. There are also tracks without any play icon, these were scrobbled by other users and are not available to play.
Directly from artists and labels
Many of the artists and labels using Last.fm make their music available to play as full-length promos, or even as free downloads.
When a track is available in full length, you can play it using the player on its track page. Or check out Last.fm Discover, which lets you explore the free music uploaded by our artists and labels in a fun and easy way.
When a track is available as a free download, it is marked as such, and can be downloaded via the "free download" link next to its name in track listings or from its track page. You can browse these tracks by genre on our free music downloads page.
1) Library: Your Library radio plays you all tracks you’ve ever scrobbled to your profile, or tracks by artists you’ve added to your Library otherwise. You can listen to your own Library radio or to other users’ stations.
2) Recommendations: The Recommendations radio is a personal station for you, which lets you listen to the artists that have been recommended to you by Last.fm. You can view and manage your recommendations here.
3) Global Tags: Global Tag stations play all items all users have tagged with a specific tag.
4) Similar Artists: Similar Artist radio plays music which is similar to a given artist. Similar artists are automatically created based on our users’ listening habits; also see: How are similar artists calculated? These radio stations are not endorsed by any artist.
5) Neighbourhood: Neighbourhood radio stations play music from your or other users' neighbours' libraries.
6) Groups: A group’s Member Radio plays music from the group members’ libraries.
7) Mix Radio: The tracks you’ll hear on Mix Radio have been selected in three different ways: some are brand new recommended tracks; others are tracks that you haven’t scrobbled before, but by artists that you know already; and the rest are simply tracks that you know already. More info here.
8) Friends Radio: a station of music made up of tracks from your Last.fm friends' libraries.
There are different reasons why you might get a “no content” or “not enough content” error when listening to the radio:
Although we have a lot of artists, albums and tracks in our catalogue, please remember that only those with a play icon can be previewed – this goes for radio stations, too.
Due to radio licensing laws, we can’t allow for our radio streams to play tracks from one artist or album more than a certain number of times per a set time frame. For example, it’s not possible to listen to five tracks by the same artist within one hour, on the radio; this doesn’t affect previews.
Therefore, please check that the radio station you’re listening to has enough playable content – at least 45 tracks by 15 different artists – as otherwise it might run out of content for you due to these licensing restrictions.
If it’s your own radio station that gives you this error (such as your Library radio, or Mix radio), you’ll need to add more tracks to it so that it won’t run out of content too quickly.
Another way to overcome this error message is to either wait it out, or to listen to something else. Times like these are a great opportunity to go out digging for other radio stations. You never know what you may come across!
Last.fm don't offer on-demand track listening for most of our catalogue. By default we only allow 30 second previews of tracks. Some artists may have chosen to make their tracks full track previews, and you'll be able to see these at the top of artist and track pages. However, our track pages will display playlinks to 3rd party services available in your region that provide on demand listening and scrobbling support for that track. Below are listed some of the services and their availability by region:
Spotify: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
MOG: USA, Australia Rdio: United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Spain, Portugal, United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden
Deezer: France, Ireland, The Netherlands, Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Canada, Australasia
Hype Machine: Worldwide Simfy: Germany, Austria and Switzerland Yandex: Russian Federation Vevo (video links): USA and Canada YouTube (video links): Worldwide, although some content will be restricted due to licensing restrictions Tape.tv: Germany, Austria, Switzerland
We hope to add more services as and when they become available in your territory, so keep checking back!
If you come across tracks, or even artists on Last.fm that you can’t listen to as they’re not available to play – this is when they’re not marked with a play icon – but that have other listeners, this is because these users have scrobbled their own music files when listening to them with their own media player on their computer.
By scrobbling your music, information about the artist, album and track names is sent to Last.fm, and based on this information many statistics, like an artist’s tracks charts or the top listeners are generated. You can read more about this here in the “What is scrobbling?” FAQ.
Yes! From April 2011 we’ve implemented a pause button for Radio on the website, our iPhone app and our Android app. The feature will be implemented across our partner players in forthcoming updates, so make sure you always have the latest update installed.
Yes, you can. If you’re using the Last.fm Scrobbler, simply go to “Recently Banned” in the “My Profile” sidebar on the left-hand side, open the expanded view and right-click the track you wish to un-ban – clicking “Un-ban This Track” will remove it from your banned tracks.
On the website, you can click the “More” or gear button for a banned track and select “Unban track” from the dropdown.
This depends on where in the world you are based, and on how you are listening to the radio. Last.fm radio is a subscriber feature in some countries, and a subscription is required to listen on your desktop, mobile or hardware device. Please see below for where and how the radio is available in your location:
If you live in the UK, US or Germany:
If you live in one of these three countries, you can listen to Last.fm radio for free on the website. A subscription is required to listen on your desktop, or via your mobile or hardware device.
If you live in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland or Brazil:
Last.fm radio is a subscriber feature in these countries. As a subscriber, you can listen on the website, where you get a 50 tracks free trial to try before you buy. Your subscription will allow you to listen on your desktop, too.
If you live in another country:
If you live in a country other than the aforementioned ones, unfortunately Last.fm radio is no longer available to you, even if you are a subscriber. See our announcement for more details.
Note: Free trials for Last.fm Radio are available where radio is a subscriber feature. For radio on the Last.fm website, users in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Brazil get a free radio trial. In the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, we offer free, advertising supported radio, without trials. In all other countries, we will soon end our subscription radio service and are not offering free trials any longer.
If you are eligible for a free radio trial, to activate it, you must sign up for a free Last.fm user account and verify your email address, and then be logged in on the website with your account.
Once you’ve done this you can start listening to Last.fm Radio – To start listening, type in your favourite artist or tag (genre); you'll then be able to listen to 50 tracks of Last.fm Radio to try before you buy.
Once you start listening, you'll see a message indicating roughly how much of your free trial you've used up. A track’s play is defined as 30 seconds, which means that if you skip a track after it’s been playing for more than 30 seconds this will count towards your 50 track free trial.
When your free trial is over, you’ll need to subscribe in order to continue listening to the radio. You can do this, or learn more about subscriptions first on the Subscribe page.
Yes, on the radio page you can create either a combo radio station with multiple artists, or one with multiple tags. You can add up to three artists or three tags for a station, choosing from artists and tags selected for you based on your music taste.
Multi-Artist Radio is a “Similar Artists” combo station, which will play you music similar to ANY of the artists that you choose. This lets you build up broader radio stations with more varied content.
Multi-Tag Radio is a “Global Tag” combo station, which will only play you music that matches ALL of the tags that you choose. So choosing ‘60s’ and ‘rock’ will only play you rock from the 60s.
The radio page doesn’t tune into any radio stations. It says “Please wait while your radio loads...” but nothing happens.
The radio plays, but there are no images or other information; the page seems to hang.
The player is buffering, but then there’s a constant “Oops! Error connecting” or “Oops, there was a problem starting this station. Please try again.” error.
If you have any of the problems described above, please try the following troubleshooting tips:
You need to accept third-party cookies to enable the delivery of ads on the radio page which if not delivered may block your radio player.
If you have any ad- or flash-blocking extensions, such as Adblock Plus or NoScript, please try disabling them. Do also check if you have any computer security or firewall that may blocking scripts.
If you have checked the above and still have problems using the radio on the site, clear your browser cache and cookies, then log in again and try to play another radio station.
If you’re having consistent connection problems, check your computer security, firewall or router settings, anything that could affect the radio connection, and make sure your soundcard is configured correctly and not busy otherwise.
The “Are you still listening message” you may get when listening to the radio is based on inactivity – you will only see it when there haven’t been any clicks, skips, or any other interaction for a set period of time. This is currently 60 minutes for regular users, and 6 hours for subscribers.
The idea behind this is that, since we pay licensing and bandwidth costs for every track we stream, playing to an empty room gets pretty expensive, and therefore we’ll pause the radio if you’ve been inactive for this given period of time.
Is there a way to turn this message off?
You’ll of course not get this inactivity message when interacting with the radio page while you’re listening to a station, as described above. You’ll also get much less frequent visits from the bear if you’re a subscriber, as the inactivity period for subscribers is 6 long hours. You can learn more about the other subscription benefits and get a subscription on our Subscribe page.
When you listen to Mix, Recommendations, Friends and Neighbourhood Radio text overlays will show you some context about why a certain song is playing. That could be usernames of people who have played the track or a list of similar artists. If you want greater detail then just click the text to find out more.
When you listen to Last.fm radio, there is a limit on the number of times you can skip tracks on each station. It’s a requirement of our licensing agreements that allow us to stream music legally.
If you ban a track, this also counts as a skip, because the banned track is skipped. If you ban a track when you have already reached your skip limit, the track will be banned as normal, but it will continue playing to the end.
If you find that you’re skipping a lot of tracks, you might want to try re-tuning to a different station, or try a multi artist or multi tag station.
Last.fm radio is available to users in the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Brazil. As of 15 January 2013, we are no longer offering our radio service in countries other than these.
In the US, UK and Germany, Last.fm radio is available for free to all users on our website; listening on your desktop with the Scrobbler, and via your iPhone or Android and most consumer electronic devices is a subscriber feature. For more details on where subscription radio services are available on mobile and hardware devices, please see this FAQ.
In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Brazil, Last.fm radio is available to subscribers on our website and via our desktop app, the Scrobbler.
play icon next to their name, which will allow you to listen to them as 30 second previews. There are also tracks without any play icon, these were scrobbled by other users and are not available to play.
button for a banned track and select “Unban track” from the dropdown.
