Embedded music player from last.fm

Last.fm, the personalised online music station have just made a very clever move. They’ve allowed their music player to be embedded in any site on the web. Here’s an extract from the email I received, as a label owner:

Our most exciting new feature is the ability to embed the Last.fm player in your own website or blog. This means that you can make your Last.fm label playlist available all over the internet as well as on Last.fm itself.

There is no limit to the amount of tracks, or the number of playlists, that you can set up as a label.

Once you’ve done this, all you need to do is head to your label page
(http://www.last.fm/label/AndyRoberts), select ‘Playlists’ and you’ll find a code to copy and paste to your site.

(Please note: You can also use the Last.fm player on your MySpace page, however due to their policy of blocking external links, the player will not link back to your Last.fm page so you will have to add that yourself.)

…

The great thing about these is that they promote your artists not just on Last.fm, but everywhere, without you having to do any work. So now, more than ever, you can really benefit by making your music available as full length previews or free downloads on Last.fm.

I think this stands a chance of spreading throughout non-musician MySpaces and blogs bringing in many new listeners to unsigned artists and to the brilliant Last.fm service.

Meanwhile, by comparison, my Sellaband page just sits there without any such means to connect to it.

You can see code which generates the widget here

Embed Last.fm Update

Since being taken over by CBS in May 2007, Last.fm seem to have withdrawn the option to embed individual songs, thus shooting themselves in the foot.

I’d now recommend instead using reverbnation.com

Here’s an example of an embedded song not from last.fm but from Andy Roberts on ReverbNation, it’s The Wreckers Prayer

Of course another popular way to embed music within a website or blog, which you might not think of straight away as it’s a obviously primarily a video site is through youtube. Youtube has probably replaced mySpace already as the platform of choice for a large number of musicians and fans. Here’s an embedded music player video on youTube of a tribute to Bob Dylan’s Mozambique uploaded by user haveringfolkclub