Last.fm artist info API

The last.fm player communicates with the server using XML-RPC. There's apparently a stable API coming soon. Here's how to fetch information about an artist using PHP5:

$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array(
      'method' => 'POST',
      'header' => 'Content-Type: text/xml',
      'content' => xmlrpc_encode_request('artistMetadata', array($artist, 'en'))
  )));
$file = file_get_contents('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/rw/xmlrpc.php', false, $context);
$meta = xmlrpc_decode($file);