I enjoy finding new music and have been interested in services such as Pandora and Last.fm for awhile. These sites analyze your listening habits (Last.fm) and preferences (Pandora) and suggest new music accordingly. Last.fm provides a plugin for music players such as iTunes and shows your songs people with similar tastes have. Pandora analyzes the structure of songs and artists you provide and plays similar music. So far I’ve had more success with Pandora since it’s easier to focus what you want to hear. However, I enjoy Last.fm a lot, particularly with the improvements they’ve recently made. You can even use both services together.

You can visit my Last.fm user page to see what I’ve been listening to recently and trends over time.

Another interesting service is the Internet iTunes Registry which parses your iTunes XML database and provides some interesting statistics. Unfortunately, their database is down for now.