
How long is Last.fm gonna last? - zeedotme
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/03/05/how-long-is-last-fm-gonna-last/?awesm=tnw.to_17X1h&utm_content=twitter-publisher-other&utm_medium=tnw.to-other&utm_source=direct-tnw.to
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beaumartinez
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.

~~~
dsingleton
(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.

Personally I believe that the on-demand part of music streaming is commodity
and more can be easily replaced, where as scrobbling provides a richer and
more personal experience. However, I do agree with parts of the article,
Last.fm hasn't moved as fast as it could have, some features need adding and
some improving. That's part of the plan for this year.

~~~
zenocon
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 recommendations based on it.

~~~
dsingleton
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.

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

~~~
dsingleton
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.

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saucerful
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.

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davidmathers
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 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
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.

~~~
davidmathers
_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&#...</a><p>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.<p><i>In fact, checking the chart now it seems that that
particular problem has cleared up.</i><p>I'm not sure what you're referring
to. I've never seen this problem clear up.<p><i>Also, artist disambiguation is
a _hard_ problem</i><p>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.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
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.

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darklajid
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
> _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>

~~~
ffumarola
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
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.

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igorgue
<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.

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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.

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paul9290
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.

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hiteshiitk
Last.fm is much better than grooveshark/spotify if you use this chrome
extension:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbncpldmanoknoahid...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbncpldmanoknoahidbgmkgobgmhnafh)

I am listening to all the music through this plugin for last 1 year.

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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>

~~~
nervechannel
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-m...](http://musicmachinery.com/2011/02/22/is-the-kdd-cup-really-music-
recommendation/)

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/>

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

~~~
oakenshield
Very interesting; thanks. I had only taken a cursory look at the KDD cup page.

I didn't know the dataset was crippled, because I doubt the netflix attack
would work with music.. there's no IMDB for music that acts as an independent
dataset. Unless they intersect the set with last.fm, of course :)

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

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

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dmazin
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.

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neutronicus
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.

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rickmb
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
_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.

