Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I have a thing I like to do with friends called I call 'song sharing' in which we listen to the same song at the same time and write what we are picturing from the music. Once the song is over we all press enter and see what each other's visions were. It's a really interesting way to get to know someone.
> people that I follow what they listen to and vice versa.
That's kind of cool, so you have a group of "friends" on facebook or whatever that you use for new music discovery?
edit: the poorly implied question would be what does using a generic social network get you that an account on a targeted site like last.fm doesn't have?
last.fm is great, but it generates a lot of noise (bands that I don't like that last.fm thinks I should like) and it doesn't allow me to instantly listen to what my friends are listening to.
When my friends post links to youtube or soundcloud it's usually only for tracks they really like. Newness is a good criteria for posting, as is good stuff you may not have listened to in a years.
You can do all this with last.fm, but for whatever reason no one I know uses it as such. Facebook, irc and message boards seem to be the best places for me to learn about new music.
So it's not really a 'launch' or a 'music service'. It's an integration.
Having said that, I think the 'listen to the same music as your friends' bit is pretty interesting.