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How long is Last.fm gonna last?

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Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#21

Post by dunk010 »

davidmathers wrote: post #18

The amount of bad data on last.fm and their lack of interest in cleaning it up makes me sad. You can see a small example just by looking at the current top songs: http://www.last.fm/charts/track Morning Mr Magpie is in position 8 instead of position 4 where it should be, because 8105 people scrobbled Morning Mr. Magpie with a dot. Tip of the iceberg. Really egregious are the albums with no scrobbles because every tra…

Actually, we do clean that data up with our corrections system. We have a large fingerprint database which allows us to work out when a track is the same and we update the charts across the site to reflect this. We even expose this as a service in the API:

http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=446 http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=447

What you're probably seeing there is tracks which are so new that we've not determined similar fingerprints for them yet, or those changes have not propagated to the charts (we use a lot of caching as you might imagine). In fact, checking the chart now it seems that that particular problem has cleared up.

Also, artist disambiguation is a _hard_ problem, but it's something that we'd very much like to address.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#22

Post by dsingleton »

zenocon wrote: post #20
dsingleton wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Last.fm) Spotify is trying to be the perfect on demand music service, Last.fm isn't. It's something we tried and ended up moving away from a year or two back. On demand music is a very difficult market to be in. There are lots of companies trying but many failing or hitting difficulties, like Spotify in the US. There are real challenges in a) being profitable and b) stay on the good side of labels. Persona…

There are so many features, integrations, interesting things, etc. that you could do with your platform, userbase, and data, it just seems like after the acquisition, all future dev. halted. It is a shame, and I'm now looking for an alternative after years of scrobbling, and being an avid user. Lately I've been using http://hypem.com -- it would be fantastic if they could mine my own personal scrobble data and make r…

I can entirely understand that, and kind of agree. We have more data that anyone could know what to do with, but we should be doing more, I'd certainly like us to be.

To try and explain the apparent lack of activity; the last couple of years have had a lot of sorting-house, changes in product (moving away from on-demand, charging for some services, etc) and some technical "house keeping". Last.fm has been around for ~8 years, that is a long time and comes with a lot of technical debt, it can slow you down.

PS: One of my favourite things about Last.fm is our approach to openness of data, our API makes it totally possible for hypem (who are awesome, especially Anthony) to use your scrobbling data, even the recommendations we generate for you, on hypem.

We believe that if the data is visible on the website then there should probably be an API for it, because if there isn't, then someone will have to scrape it anyway.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#23

Post by dsingleton »

ffumarola wrote: post #6
beaumartinez wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's both a punk rock band and a rapper with name "Foo" it probably doesn't make sense to mix them. Damn right. And yet Last.fm does. An example: Felt. "There are three artists with the name Felt "[1]. I'm wondering if using MusicBrainz or another service they could manage to differentiate them. [1] http://www.last.fm/music/Felt

I could see some sort of "disambiguation" feature like on wikipedia. So when I click on your link above, it could give me links to Felt (rock), Felt (rap), and Felt (classic). I made up the genres, but the point remains. Then clicking on Felt (rock) takes me to last.fm/music/Felt(rock).

That's the easy bit :P Copy wikipedia, disambiguate by genre and/or country .

It gets harder when someone scrobbles a track by "Felt", to which artist do you attribute it? There's a whole host of problems like that to solve too.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#25

Post by davidmathers »

dunk010 wrote: post #21
davidmathers wrote: post #18

The amount of bad data on last.fm and their lack of interest in cleaning it up makes me sad. You can see a small example just by looking at the current top songs: http://www.last.fm/charts/track Morning Mr Magpie is in position 8 instead of position 4 where it should be, because 8105 people scrobbled Morning Mr. Magpie with a dot. Tip of the iceberg. Really egregious are the albums with no scrobbles because every tra…

Actually, we do clean that data up with our corrections system. We have a large fingerprint database which allows us to work out when a track is the same and we update the charts across the site to reflect this. We even expose this as a service in the API: http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=446 http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=447 What you're probably seeing there is tracks which are so new that we've not determi…

What you're probably seeing there is tracks which are so new that we've not determined similar fingerprints for them yet

I don't think so. Look at Kanye West: http://www.last.fm/music/Kanye+West/+charts?rangetype=week&#...

Monster should be in place 3 with 14,757 listeners. Instead it's in places 12, 16, 27, and 61. It was a top 20 track for some number of weeks, but it didn't show up in the top 20.

In fact, checking the chart now it seems that that particular problem has cleared up.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. I've never seen this problem clear up.

Also, artist disambiguation is a _hard_ problem

I understand that, and I'm not criticizing that. I'm just pointing out that Pandora is making an effort to work on that hard problem while Last.fm ignores very easy problems. Specifically the easiest problem: albums in which all the track names are wrong because they all have "Explicit" or "Album Version" or some other string appended to their names.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#26

Post by chrischen »

beaumartinez wrote: post #4

Until another service comes along that allows users to record which songs they've listened to, and be as ubiquitous (there's a Last.fm plugin of some sort for practically every music software player, and even for some hardware players), I think Last.fm is safe. With services such as Spotify competing with it, though, I think Last.fm has lost its chance in the music streaming industry. I have plenty of friends with Sp…

My site, http://Like.fm, is compatible with Last.fm's API for scrobbling and many services are already supported including YouTube. Adding support for music players is relatively easy, especially when considering Last.fm has already made the idea of scrobbling a commonly understood idea.

Spotify will be a problem for Last.fm IF they can continue being free for everyone, and convert everyone to their service. Otherwise a decentralized social network will have that advantage from being able to collect more users faster.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#27

Post by chrischen »

darklajid wrote: post #2

For me last.fm died (after years of being a subscriber just to support them, first during the "open for everyone" time and then during the "I'm from Germany and wouldn't need to pay" time) already. Scrobbling makes only sense for me if I actually do something with _my_ data. Which - I don't. Listening to music on last.fm became unbearable after a while due to their inability to fix their product to distinguish artist…

It's not hard to disambiguate, especially since there are free databases like MusicBrainz that already do that for you, and especially since Last.fm is already using that data.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#29

Post by AndyKelley »

This sounds like a one-sided personal feature request list. I don't think these feature ideas are even insightful. Last.fm's killer feature is scrobbling. It's almost a diary of my life through music. I'd continue to use Last.fm even if all it did was provide stats.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#30

Post by niels_olson »

dsingleton wrote: post #13
beaumartinez wrote: post #4

Until another service comes along that allows users to record which songs they've listened to, and be as ubiquitous (there's a Last.fm plugin of some sort for practically every music software player, and even for some hardware players), I think Last.fm is safe. With services such as Spotify competing with it, though, I think Last.fm has lost its chance in the music streaming industry. I have plenty of friends with Sp…

(I work at Last.fm) Spotify is trying to be the perfect on demand music service, Last.fm isn't. It's something we tried and ended up moving away from a year or two back. On demand music is a very difficult market to be in. There are lots of companies trying but many failing or hitting difficulties, like Spotify in the US. There are real challenges in a) being profitable and b) stay on the good side of labels. Persona…

What do you think of the folks at Mendeley?
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