New on PHPMaster.com today there's a tutorial showing you how to work with the Last.fm API from your PHP applications (a REST-based service). Last.fm is a social music site and recommendation service that takes what you already listen to and suggests other artists/songs you might like.

If you are building a site for a band or artist and you want to make it more social using Last.fm, it’s a must to use their API. In this way artists and fans can become connected and fans can stay up to date on concerts and new albums. In this article I show you how to query the Last FM API to get information to build a fan website for Coldplay. We start with getting the basics about the band, then get their most popular song, the contents of their albums, and a list of the events where the band is going to play for fans to get tickets.

They show you how to use the Last.fm API library to work with the service, extracting data about the bad including basic descriptions, upcoming events, top tracks and album information.

If you're a last.fm user and have been curious about how to get the latest list of your "last played" selections, Philip Norton has just the code you'll need.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

The code pulls from the defined user's "recenttracks" feed and parses it (via a simplexml_load_string call) into an object that's looped through and outputted. Data that comes back from the feed includes artist anme, name of the track, a URL to more information about it and an image of the album cover. He also includes an updated version that caches the data for three minutes so it's not always relying on the last.fm servers to be there.