12 ms·

How long is Last.fm gonna last?

54 points by zeedotme 16y ago

darklajid 16y ago
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 artists by similar or the same name. ABS and A.B.S. is not the same. If there's both a punk rock band and a rapper with name "Foo" it probably doesn't make sense to mix them..
- beaumartinez 16y ago
  > 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 http://www.last.fm/music/Felt
  - ffumarola 16y ago
    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).
    - dsingleton 16y ago
      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.
  - unicornporn 16y ago
    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 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 , http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea+%282%29 http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea+%282%29 ).
- dsingleton 16y ago
  It's not ideal, but artist-disambiguation is also a non-trivial problem to solve. The effort of which needs to be balanced against a) how many people it affects and b) what else needs doing.
- chrischen 16y ago
  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.
beaumartinez 16y ago
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 Spotify accounts but very few with Last.fm accounts (and those that do have them solely as vestiges of the MySpace era). As the article says, the problem is, as with so many of these small, new companies that get bought by much bigger ones (Flickr and Delicious come to mind as similar cases), they stagnated and have done nothing new.
- jessor 16y ago
  See http://libre.fm/ http://libre.fm/
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - mkelly 16y ago
    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.)
- saucerful 16y ago
  Typical startup fallacy. Just because they aren't overhauling their site every few months doesn't mean they are stagnating. There is a difference between being stagnant and being stable. The new content and change come from the data users scrobble and from the new music musicians make. The site is a platform for that, and IMHO it does its job perfectly. Not only that, but it makes a lot of money doing it.
dmazin 16y ago
Considering the fact that they recently settled on charging users for listening to their stations on the iPhone, and that Apple added the 30% subscription demand shortly after that, I'd say, well, prediction is bullshit.
saucerful 16y ago
I've been using last.fm for just over 7 years (and I was one of the last of my friends to join). I love it. Why? Because unlike other "social networks", last.fm is actually useful. For me, its is about data, both aggregating my listening data (across several devices including desktop laptop and squeeezebox) and using it to recommend new bands to me as well as local concerts to go to. This article is laughably bad. It's creating a problem where there isn't one. Last.fm is not on the decline. It is not any less exciting than it was 5 years ago. In fact, the service only gets more interesting the longer you use it. IMO the premise for the article is false. Moreover, the recommendations for improving Last.fm are weak and for the most part frivolous.
paul9290 16y ago
Here in the US I use last.fm fairly regularly via firefox toolbar add-on fire.fm. With it I just hit play, pause, fwd and stop to listen to my last.fm station; it's controls sit at bottom right of my browser. On my iPHone though I use Pandora more then Last.fm. Pandora for non indie/vanguard music plays better recommendation then last.fm does.
rickmb 16y ago
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 perfect music service will only come if the industry finally gives up its outdated restrictions.
- luu 16y ago
  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. Can you explain what that means? I'm only a casual user of last.fm, so I wouldn't notice a negative change even it slapped me in face; I'm genuinely curious about how they've become a mouthpiece for industry, and how that's changed the user experience.
- unicornporn 16y ago
  Why not use both? Spotify scrobbles. You could use Last.fm to make recommendations based on your listening data, I do.
igorgue 16y ago
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/last.fm+thenextweb.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/last.fm+thenextweb.com/ Just sayin' and that's not even counting the amount of people that don't go to the website and just scrobble all day (me), or use the streaming app (me sometimes). Last.fm is far from dead, in fact I love it (and many people does). Like a previous comment said: it's actually useful.
hiteshiitk 16y ago
Last.fm is much better than grooveshark/spotify if you use this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbncpldmanoknoahidbgmkgobgmhnafh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbncpldmanoknoahid... I am listening to all the music through this plugin for last 1 year.
davidmathers 16y ago
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 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 track on the album has "(Album Version)" or some such affixed to its name. Once on a Pandora station they played me a track by a band called Burial, instead of the dubstep artist Burial I had added to the station. So I sent them an email and they thanked me and told me the issue was very important to them and they cleaned their data. Last.fm doesn't bother, even when it causes their top-20 charts to be completely wrong.
- dunk010 16y ago
  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=446 http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=447 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.
  - davidmathers 16y ago
    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&subtype=tracks 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.
brackin 16y ago
I use Last.fm to scobble and for music/concert recommendations, it knows my library really well so is great at recommending stuff.
Dramatize 16y ago
Last.fm and Dropbox are the only consumer services I pay for. Their streaming radio works well.
AndyKelley 16y ago
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.
neutronicus 16y ago
I love last.fm I don't even use the scrobbler or anything like that, I've just found last.fm to be the best "make me a radio station that sounds like an artist" service.
oakenshield 16y ago
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 http://www.kdd.org/kdd2011/kddcup.shtml
- nervechannel 16y ago
  It's actually pretty debatable whether this year's KDD Cup will really help the science of music recommendation: http://musicmachinery.com/2011/02/22/is-the-kdd-cup-really-music-recommendation/ http://musicmachinery.com/2011/02/22/is-the-kdd-cup-really-m... Because it's entirely anonymised, not just the users but the artists too -- c.f. Netflix's problems with deanonymization: http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/ http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/ This means you can't use any interesting characteristics of the music itself, or the associated metadata, to aid the recommendations. All the interesting domain knowledge is stripped out, which likely means the best solutions still won't work as well as algorithms that use metadata (like Last.fm's) or content analysis (like Pandora's) or both, and certainly won't lead to any particularly interesting insights about what drives people's tastes. Disclaimer: I work at Last.fm

54 points by zeedotme 16y ago

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 artists by similar or the same name. ABS and A.B.S. is not the same. If there's both a punk rock band and a rapper with name "Foo" it probably doesn't make sense to mix them..

beaumartinez 16y ago
> 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 http://www.last.fm/music/Felt
- ffumarola 16y ago
  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).
  - dsingleton 16y ago
    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.
- unicornporn 16y ago
  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 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 , http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea+%282%29 http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea+%282%29 ).
dsingleton 16y ago
It's not ideal, but artist-disambiguation is also a non-trivial problem to solve. The effort of which needs to be balanced against a) how many people it affects and b) what else needs doing.
chrischen 16y ago
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.

beaumartinez 16y ago

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 Spotify accounts but very few with Last.fm accounts (and those that do have them solely as vestiges of the MySpace era). As the article says, the problem is, as with so many of these small, new companies that get bought by much bigger ones (Flickr and Delicious come to mind as similar cases), they stagnated and have done nothing new.

jessor 16y ago
See http://libre.fm/ http://libre.fm/
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- mkelly 16y ago
  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.)
saucerful 16y ago
Typical startup fallacy. Just because they aren't overhauling their site every few months doesn't mean they are stagnating. There is a difference between being stagnant and being stable. The new content and change come from the data users scrobble and from the new music musicians make. The site is a platform for that, and IMHO it does its job perfectly. Not only that, but it makes a lot of money doing it.

dmazin 16y ago

Considering the fact that they recently settled on charging users for listening to their stations on the iPhone, and that Apple added the 30% subscription demand shortly after that, I'd say, well, prediction is bullshit.

saucerful 16y ago

I've been using last.fm for just over 7 years (and I was one of the last of my friends to join). I love it. Why? Because unlike other "social networks", last.fm is actually useful. For me, its is about data, both aggregating my listening data (across several devices including desktop laptop and squeeezebox) and using it to recommend new bands to me as well as local concerts to go to. This article is laughably bad. It's creating a problem where there isn't one. Last.fm is not on the decline. It is not any less exciting than it was 5 years ago. In fact, the service only gets more interesting the longer you use it. IMO the premise for the article is false. Moreover, the recommendations for improving Last.fm are weak and for the most part frivolous.

paul9290 16y ago

Here in the US I use last.fm fairly regularly via firefox toolbar add-on fire.fm. With it I just hit play, pause, fwd and stop to listen to my last.fm station; it's controls sit at bottom right of my browser. On my iPHone though I use Pandora more then Last.fm. Pandora for non indie/vanguard music plays better recommendation then last.fm does.

rickmb 16y ago

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 perfect music service will only come if the industry finally gives up its outdated restrictions.

luu 16y ago
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. Can you explain what that means? I'm only a casual user of last.fm, so I wouldn't notice a negative change even it slapped me in face; I'm genuinely curious about how they've become a mouthpiece for industry, and how that's changed the user experience.
unicornporn 16y ago
Why not use both? Spotify scrobbles. You could use Last.fm to make recommendations based on your listening data, I do.

igorgue 16y ago

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/last.fm+thenextweb.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/last.fm+thenextweb.com/ Just sayin' and that's not even counting the amount of people that don't go to the website and just scrobble all day (me), or use the streaming app (me sometimes). Last.fm is far from dead, in fact I love it (and many people does). Like a previous comment said: it's actually useful.

hiteshiitk 16y ago

Last.fm is much better than grooveshark/spotify if you use this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbncpldmanoknoahidbgmkgobgmhnafh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbncpldmanoknoahid... I am listening to all the music through this plugin for last 1 year.

davidmathers 16y ago

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 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 track on the album has "(Album Version)" or some such affixed to its name. Once on a Pandora station they played me a track by a band called Burial, instead of the dubstep artist Burial I had added to the station. So I sent them an email and they thanked me and told me the issue was very important to them and they cleaned their data. Last.fm doesn't bother, even when it causes their top-20 charts to be completely wrong.

dunk010 16y ago
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=446 http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=447 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.
- davidmathers 16y ago
  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&subtype=tracks 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.

brackin 16y ago

I use Last.fm to scobble and for music/concert recommendations, it knows my library really well so is great at recommending stuff.

Dramatize 16y ago

Last.fm and Dropbox are the only consumer services I pay for. Their streaming radio works well.

AndyKelley 16y ago

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.

neutronicus 16y ago

I love last.fm I don't even use the scrobbler or anything like that, I've just found last.fm to be the best "make me a radio station that sounds like an artist" service.

oakenshield 16y ago

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 http://www.kdd.org/kdd2011/kddcup.shtml

nervechannel 16y ago
It's actually pretty debatable whether this year's KDD Cup will really help the science of music recommendation: http://musicmachinery.com/2011/02/22/is-the-kdd-cup-really-music-recommendation/ http://musicmachinery.com/2011/02/22/is-the-kdd-cup-really-m... Because it's entirely anonymised, not just the users but the artists too -- c.f. Netflix's problems with deanonymization: http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/ http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/ This means you can't use any interesting characteristics of the music itself, or the associated metadata, to aid the recommendations. All the interesting domain knowledge is stripped out, which likely means the best solutions still won't work as well as algorithms that use metadata (like Last.fm's) or content analysis (like Pandora's) or both, and certainly won't lead to any particularly interesting insights about what drives people's tastes. Disclaimer: I work at Last.fm