I think Last.fm is one of the most important sites of the web 2.0 era. It’s an Internet radio station, you’ve probably heard of it but if you haven’t tried it you should. Probably my favorite background listening when I’m relaxing is the trance tag radio station.

Many people use Last.fm’s soical networking features, and why not–for music fans it’s a great way to meet people online. But I use enough social networking stuff and the reason I go to Last.fm is for the music–because recently it’s become my favorite place to discover new music.

When I put on trance tag radio, it plays songs that others have tagged trance. Some of them don’t belong, but most of the selections do at least somewhat and it’s easy to skip to the next song anyway. And once in a while, I find a new song that I really like.

But this is where Last.fm needs an upgrade. Instead of sending me on a search on Amazon.com for the whole album, I should be able to buy the mp3 right away. They should partner with Apple iTunes or Beatport.com or build their own music store, and sell individual tracks. As of now I just head over to one of those places for the song, sometimes after finding it on Last.fm. (Tabs pose an underrated threat to e-commerce sites, because they put so much information–crucially, from different sources–on the same browser at the same time).

It’s true that other sites like di.fm have something close to that, in terms of Internet radio and a music store. But that site lacks the web 2.0 features and buzz that Last.fm has.

Now, Last.fm has a lot of good music but since so many of their listeners like rock and roll they don’t exactly specialize in electronic music the way a more focused site could–and because of the tagging and things the more listeners in a certain genre the more interesting the radio station for that genre so that means something.

Come to think of it, maybe this calls for all these ideas being thrown together into a new electronic music radio/record store site. Of course, maybe not–the market seems to be flooded already with half-baked Internet startups.