Jewish Music on Last.FM

Teruah's got a new toy, a Last.FM radio. Last.FM is a free online music service that creates playlists for you based on previous music you've listened to and music that people with similar taste have listened to. Like most similar services, it's really hard to get it to consistently play Jewish music. That's mostly because Jewish music cuts across music genre's in a way that's hard for a software algorithm to get it's electrons around.

But Last.FM has added a clever feature that allows the determined to game the system. The feature is the ability to generate a randomly selected playlist based on user applied tags. What this means to us, is that the shiny new Teruah Last.FM radio will play a never-ending stream of songs that some Last.FM user has tagged as Jewish.

Will it match your definition of Jewish music? Will it be a musical style you like? You spin the wheel you'll take your chances. What I will say is that I love it enough to feature it on the blog. In an hour of listening I heard rock, heavy metal, reggae, hip-hop, jazz, classical, klezmer, yiddish and folk. I didn't love every song, or even understand why every song had been tagged 'Jewish,' but I loved a lot of the songs and even when out and bought an album on the spot after hear one of the tracks.

So take it for a spin and let me know what you think.

If you're a band or a label, go to the Last.FM 'Promote Your Music' page for instructions on how to upload your music. Then tag it Jewish and join the fun.