College students are addicted to music. Roaming the halls of a residence hall, you can hear the bass thumping on an Eminem track or the classic sounds of Pink Floyd blasting from the room next door. So it's not surprising that when MP3s became big, college students were there.

The original Napster was the first way to get music online. Although it's shut down, the other peer-to-peer sites that popped up never really had the same allure of Napster, despite them offering access to more.

With legal options abound, one of the things I missed most about the old Napster was the ability to see a person's entire collection. You found songs that you liked, realized that person had really similar tastes to you, but then there's songs there that you had never heard of. You download them, and suddenly that band's made a new fan. Many times, that would result in a CD sale. It hasn't been lost on some researchers that CD sales began a general decline around the same time Napster was shut down. It's just very hard, with an increasingly cluttered landscape, to discover new music based on the taste of others with like interests.

Enter Audioscrobbler and last.fm (link). The technology runs through a plug-in you download that tracks what you're listening to in such software as iTunes, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player. Like many of these programs, it tracks how many times you listen to a song. But it also mines this data in so many other ways.

The site gives you a weekly breakdown of what tracks you listened to, so you can see trends over time. The new Fiona Apple CD came out and now you've become an addict to her music again? You can see that trend through the data. It also groups not only by track, but by artist, so you can see which artists are most popular with a user.

The site will calculate "neighbors" after you've listened to a certain number of tracks. Neighbors are people with similar musical interests, and brings back that cool idea of being able to discover music based on people with similar taste to yours. Along with neighbors, the site has a "Recommendations" feature that gives you a weighting based on the community as a whole, to tell you artists you're missing that you would probably like.

There's other interesting features too, including thousands of message boards, a radio stream based on your musical tastes, and (like every other site in the universe these days) a blog feature. You can also friend people a la MySpace or Facebook.

Based on my experience with the site, it's pretty dead on in determining like-minded users, as well as the recommendations it's making. I've noticed many of the recommendations it makes are of artists I've liked along the line, but my iPod's fully loaded, so I tend to drift around musical styles with the changing seasons.

To get a peek at what it's all about, check out my personal profile (link). You can register for the site by clicking in the upper right-hand corner.