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How long is Last.fm gonna last?

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Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#31

Post by mkelly »

jessor wrote: post #8
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…

See http://libre.fm/

libre.fm is cool, but the UI really disappointed me.

The site does bad job explaining itself, and therefore only makes sense if you already use last.fm. The UI is crude (javascript links with 'href="#"' which bounce you up to the top of the page all the time, etc) and inconsistent (nav bars come and go).

I think it's an awesome idea, but I think it needs some TLC from a good web developer. (And to be fair, here, I don't claim that I could do any better -- I'm bad at web UIs, and lean heavily on others when I have to make them.)

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#33

Post by oakenshield »

The things I think Last.fm has going for them:

* Charts (of course)

* Recommendations: I use last.fm for two kinds of recommendations: (1) where it uses listener history to figure out similar bands and albums, which in some ways is inferior to feature-based recommender systems like Pandora, and (2) where it uses neighbor listening history (e.g., neighbor radio) -- I can't count the number of times I've been introduced to awesome bands in genres I wasn't looking for just because a neighbor had it on their charts.

* Shoutboxes for each artist, album, and song: I can't count the number of times I've just instantly "loved" a song and needed someplace to shout something out with others who like the song.

Last.fm has a huge user base and should try to be a one-stop shop for music, like Netflix is for video. Here're some tips

* Revamp your business model: copy Grooveshark's business model if you have to, but get anyone who wants to listen to a song come to your site and not go to Youtube for a low-quality version.

* Increase avg. time on site: If you implement the suggestion above (where I can play any song I like), then you have a wealth of _real_ related song/album/artist to offer the user. You may be able to remove annoying audio ads and just rely on click ads. It also helps if you implement a site-wide list like youtube's playlist.

* Improve recommendations: Netflix had a decent algorithm, but conducting the Netflix prize got them a lot of publicity _and_ a much better algorithm. You could do the same with the ton of data that you have. Yahoo! is already ahead of you in this: see this year's KDD cup: http://www.kdd.org/kdd2011/kddcup.shtml

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#34

Post by xiongchiamiov »

davidmathers wrote: post #25
dunk010 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 real killer for auto-correction is that it seems to require many users to work - artists in the thousands don't seem to ever get corrected.

It also doesn't help that Pandora has terrible tagging. I have a number of "Horner, James - Braveheart, Film Score"-esqe scrobbles that originate from them.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#35

Post by chrischen »

dsingleton wrote: post #22
zenocon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there a way to dump or export all my data from Last.fm, all at once?

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#36

Post by unicornporn »

rickmb wrote: post #14

I quit Last.fm when they sold out to become yet another mouthpiece for the music industry instead of a social service for music lovers that put their users first. I use Spotify these days, which never pretended to be anything else but a music industry outlet, but I'm not half as passionate about it as I used to be about Last.fm. I really miss Last.fm's sofar unrivaled community driven recommendations. I'm afraid the…

Why not use both? Spotify scrobbles. You could use Last.fm to make recommendations based on your listening data, I do.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#37

Post by unicornporn »

beaumartinez wrote: post #3
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…

> 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

Yes, I've been scrobbling using audioscrobbler/last.fm since 2004 and this is quite bad for the experience. I've been listening quite a lot to a german dnb act called Panacea ( http://www.last.fm/music/Panacea ) the latest month. In my listening stats a picture of an american base hip-hop group shows up. Take a look at how Discogs (one of the best services I know) separates their artists with similar names ( http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea , http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea+%282%29 ).

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#38

Post by dsingleton »

chrischen wrote: post #35
dsingleton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there a way to dump or export all my data from Last.fm, all at once?

There isn't a Facebook style "Give me a chuffing great zip" option, but there are lots of API wrappers to pull down your scrobble history (for example). It could be friendlier to non technical users, but it's entirely possible.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#39

Post by bryanlarsen »

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…

Counter data-point here: I just let my last.fm subscription lapse and switched to rdio because of on demand music even though its "related music" throws up a lot more crap than last.fm does.

Re: How long is Last.fm gonna last?

#40

Post by dsingleton »

niels_olson wrote: post #30
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…

What do you think of the folks at Mendeley?

They're a) lovely, b) just down the road from us, and c) share some of our old staff.

We see them in the pub quite a bit.

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