Last.fm is fantastic* for discovering new music**. Bleep is great for buying new music.
They must be joined!
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* a post is brewing on what was IMHO lost in their redesign.
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** looks like there is going to be an annual day celebrating what used to be the very best way to discover new music: John Peel.
Petafloptimism 
Yes, too true. I love the new look but I can’t believe I am now expected to download standalone software to listen to their streams, and they got rid of the lovely personalised album cover quilts. What else?
Bleep is indeed one of the nicest online shops I have ever used. The flash-based track preview blows everything else away.
I’m not so sure about Last.fm anymore; the concept is indeed spectacular, and they finally have a site that doesn’t choke on every reload, but the requirement for the proprietary player really sucks (although you can make a good argument why it makes sense for them).
Did you check out Pandora? They offer a similar service to Last.fm but using a totally different strategy. http://pandora.com/ (Check my blog for an introduction to Pandora, and an analysis of the two concepts.)
And I still have some invites if anyone is interested.
mardoen: semantics there! it’s an open source player (and plugins) under the BSD licence. Just happens to only connect to one endpoint: http://www.last.fm/help/player/ for more.
The quilt lives! Click your ‘charts’ tab, then select the ‘album’ chart. It’s bigger than ever, in fact…
Nick: ah, ok. Doesn’t change my criticism, but now I wonder when people will port it to a cellphone. 😉
My album ‘quilt’ is really out of date; it shows albums from music I’ve hardly ever listened to, and some I’ve not listened to for aaaages.
But what I want to know, can you see that long log of tracks (sorted by time) you used to be able to, stretching back into time. It was there for you to remove stuff from your profile, but has that gone as well?
the link to last.fm in your post is broken…
Fixed now – thanks Anon…