Last.fm launched an embeddable radio widget today that lets you add a personalized Last.fm radio station wherever Flash widgets are accepted.
The widget can play in three modes: a stream of what songs your recently listened to on Last.fm, hand-picked tracks, or full songs of related artists based on your personal preferences. If you want to play specific tracks, you must seed the widget with 15 or more songs by different artists and play it in shuffle mode.
Personalizing a full radio stream is dead simple. You just feed their widget generator artist names, tags, or MySpace page URL. The widget we have below is based off of Tom’s MySpace page. If you’re a Last.fm member, you can create a widget based on your existing personalized Last.fm station.
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.lastfmWidget {float:left;width:100%;}.lastfmWidget object {float:left;}.lastfmWidget div {height:20px;}.lastfmWidget a {overflow:hidden;height:20px;margin:0;padding:0;text-decoration:none;}.lastfmHead a {float:left;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:0 -20px;}.lastfmHead a:hover {background-position: 0 0;}.lastfmFoot {clear:left;float:left;background-repeat:repeat-x;background-position:0 100%;}.lastfmFoot a {float:right;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:0 -20px;}.lastfmFoot a.config {width:85px;background-position: 0 -20px;}.lastfmFoot a.config:hover {background-position: 0 0;}.lastfmFoot a.view {width:74px;background-position:-85px -20px;}.lastfmFoot a.view:hover {background-position:-85px 0;}.lastfmFoot a.popup {width:25px;background-position:-159px -20px;}.lastfmFoot a.popup:hover {background-position:-159px 0;}
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The new widget certainly lowers the barriers to getting your personalized music station, now easily available to non-members and providing a better experience than MySpace’s own highly restricted player. However, it also adds another point of Amazon affiliate sales for Last.fm.
There are several other music widgets online. Finetune has an artist radio widget. Pandora has an API for distributing music. MyStrand’s “Flash Chart” lets users stream their recently played songs to visitors. iLike’s widget similarly lets users display their recent activity. In a somewhat legal gray area, HypeMachine and RadioBlogClub let listeners craft play lists of songs pulled from servers all over the internet. Other embeddable widgets let user’s pull music from their online music library (TuneFeed, MediaMaster) or single songs (MOG, iJigg).