Last.FM Android Application Launches

Get excited, music lovers and Android fans because a Last.FM application has just hit the Android Market! The Last.FM team officially added Android and the G1 as supported hardware and announced the Android Application launch on their blog:

Our new Android app is a fully featured Last.fm radio application that leverages the open nature of the Android OS. You’ll be able to stream your favorite Last.fm stations, view your friends’ profiles and watch out for up coming events.

One Android only feature we’re pretty excited about is… background streaming! This means you can keep listening while you browse the web, buy songs from Amazon or check out maps for an event that looks interesting. We’ve been playing with the prototypes for a while and can honestly say this is a killer feature.

Keeping with the open spirit of Android, we’re also working to make sure it’s easy to scrobble music you play in other applications. We’ve been talking to Google about scrobbling the built-in media player and will be exposing our service in a way that allows other applications to scrobble songs. This is a work in progress but something that’s unique to Android that we intend to fully embrace.

I want everyone to take special note of the verbage used by Last.FM including:

• Android only feature
• background streaming!
• the open spirit of Android
• unique to Android

Clearly, Android has allowed Last.FM to do things with THIS application that other mobile platforms don’t allow. And, the openness that Last.FM is embracing will allow OTHER applications to embrace what Last.FM has done and incorporate their features in new apps and mashups. Brilliant.

And best of all… you can now download Last.FM from the Android Market so get off your computer, test it out and let us know how you like it! We’ll be sure to do the same.

[Thanks Lukasz]