last.fm subscribers could test out new features for the past weeks and today they went live.
The radio streams are now taking a more prominent place as they have been moved from the sidebar into the main profile. And it’s not just subscribers that can listen to the personal streams now, free users can too. What still hasn’t changed is that you can’t listen to your own profile stream unless you are a subscriber. It’s not last.fm’s fault, the radio license they have demands it. Not that it makes any sense, but I guess the music industry knows best *sigh*
But you can now share your station as well by either sending your friends a link, or you can embed it in other profiles or even your blog.
Another new feature that I’ve already come to love is that you can now create your own playlist and feature it on your profile or website. Currently it seems to be restricted to 1 playlist with 25 tracks. During the beta testing you could share the playlist like your radio streams, but that feature seems to have gone. For now, anyway. Let’s hope they will bring it back. I also remember reading in the beta forums that users would be allowed to create multiple playlists in the future.What limits the functionality of the playlist a bit though is that the vast majority of tracks are only available as 30 sec previews, so go pester your favourite artists to change that. I do too. But last.fm has made it easier to actually find fully streamable tracks and artists.
The blue play buttons mark previews, the gold ones are fully streamable. They are also displayed in the Overall Top Artists and Tracks lists. To add a track to your playlist just move the mouse over its name and a new button appears.
This can be done on any page that displays tracks- album pages, your dashboard and profile pages. And obviously your playlist is also editable and you can give it a descriptive name. And clicking the blue or gold buttons will let you listen to the tracks right there and then.
Something else for you to use on your blog – or MySpace profile – is the Quilt. This will display either the covers of your top albums, or the top artists’ pictures.
Move your mouse over the tiles, it’s interactive 
You can now also import your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Hotmail. If they are already registered with last.fm you’ll easily find them that way.
Last but not least there have been layout tweaks, like making the album art and artist pics consistent in size when they are displayed next to your Recently Listened Tracks and Weekly Top Artists lists. And to find out about the rest you better go and have a look for yourself, there’s quite a few more things to discover.
Happy scrobbling 
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