Since the demise of Lala, which had previously been my favorite music site, I’ve been experimenting with different sites in an attempt to find a new favorite. Both Slacker and Pandora are adequate, although neither are very good at helping me find new music and despite numerous attempts to “teach” it my preferences, Pandora continues to slip in the occasional death metal tune even though I absolutely despise the genre. I like Last.fm a little better, since it gives users the option of indexing your library and listening history from third party programs such as iTunes or Windows Media Player and incorporating that information along with your activity on the site to give you more personalized recommendations. I had been using Last.fm almost exclusively until I learned about Exfm, a site that scours music blogs for MP3s. Exfm is fully integrated with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Last.fm so that users can browse and collect MP3s and then share them with their social network, as well as follow other users to see what they are listening to and what new music they have discovered. Browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and an iPhone app are also helpful. I’ve only used the site for about a month but so far I like what I see. Exfm is excellent for discovering new music and the fact that it integrates so well with Last.fm makes it easy to go to Exfm when you’re in the mood for something new and then switch back to Last.fm when you want to listen something from your library – and all of your listening history will be recorded. If you enjoy discovering new music and sharing it with your social network, Exfm is definitely worth checking out.
