|
|
|
|
Last.fm
|
| |
|
| |
Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 21 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD).
Using a music recommendation system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations, the user's computer or some portable music devices.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Last.fm' Start a new discussion about 'Last.fm' Answer questions from other users |
Encyclopedia
Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 21 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD).
Using a music recommendation system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations, the user's computer or some portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user's profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.
Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rights holder has previously authorised it. Registration, which is free, is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations .
History
The current Last.fm website was developed from two separate sources: Audioscrobbler and Last.fm, which were merged in 2005.
Audioscrobbler began as a computer science project by Richard Jones while he attended the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science in the United Kingdom. Jones developed the first plugins, and then opened an API to the community, after which many music players on different operating system platforms were supported. Audioscrobbler was limited to recording music its users played on a registered computer, which allowed for charting and collaborative filtering.
Last.fm was founded in 2002 by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, Saulyus Chyamolonskas, Michael Breidenbruecker and Thomas Willomitzer, as an internet radio station and music community site, using similar music profiles to generate dynamic playlists. The site name takes advantage of a domain hack using the top level domain of Micronesia, popular with FM radio related sites. The "love" and "ban" buttons allowed users to gradually customise their profiles. Last.fm won the Europrix 2002 and was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica in 2003.
The Audioscrobbler and Last.fm teams began to work closely together, both teams moving into the same offices in Whitechapel, London, and by 2003 Last.fm was fully integrated with Audioscrobbler profiles. Input could come through an Audioscrobbler plugin or a Last.fm station. The sites also shared many community forums, although a few were unique to each site.
The old Audioscrobbler site at the audioscrobbler.com domain name was wholly merged into the new Last.fm site in 9 August 2005. This launched audioscrobbler.net as a separate development-oriented site on 5 September 2005. However, at the very bottom of each of the Last.fm pages there was an Audioscrobbler "slogan", which changes each time the page is refreshed. Based on well known sayings or advertisements, these originally appeared at the top of the old Audioscrobbler website pages and were all created and contributed by the original site members.
An update to the site was made on 14 July 2006 which included a new software application for playing Last.fm radio streams and for logging of tracks played with other media players. Other changes included the improvement of the friends system and updating it to require a two-way friendship, the addition of the Last.fm "Dashboard" where users can see on one page relevant information for their profile, expanded options for purchasing music from online retailers and a new visual design for the web site (including an optional black colour scheme).
The site began expanding its language base on 15 July 2006, when a Japanese version of the site was launched. Currently, the site is available in various other languages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Turkish and Simplified Chinese.
In late 2006, the site won Best Community Music Site at the BT Digital Music Awards in October. Last.fm, also, teamed up with EMI on Tuneglue-Audiomap. Furthermore in January 2007 it was nominated for Best Website in the NME Awards.
At the end of April 2007, rumours of negotiations between Viacom and Last.fm emerged, suggesting that Viacom intended to purchase Last.fm for about £225 million.
In May 2007 it was announced that Channel 4 Radio was to broadcast a weekly show called Worldwide Chart that reflects what Last.fm users around the world are listening to. There are also plans to add a video section, enabling users to create their own personalised video channels.
On 30 May 2007 it was announced that Last.fm has been bought by CBS for £140 million with Last.fm's current management team staying in place.
In July 2008, the "new generation" Last.fm was launched featuring a completely new layout, colour-scheme and several new features as well as some old ones removed. This was, however, met with dissatisfaction amongst some users, who complained about, among other things, the "ugly and non-user-friendly layout," numerous bugs and slowness of the site. The new design has also removed most mentions of Audioscrobbler. A month after the redesign was launched a press release was issued by CBS crediting the redesign with generating 20% growth in the site's traffic, however industry observers pointed out that this still leaves last.fm in a distant second place behind imeem.com.
Funding and staff
Last.fm Ltd is funded from the sale of online advertising space, monthly user subscriptions and donations. In 2004 the company received the first round of angel money, from Peter Gardner, an investment banker who was introduced to the founders as early as 2002. A second round was led by Stefan Glaenzer (joined by Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman), who bought into Michael Breidenbrueckers shares as well. In 2006 the company received the first round of venture capital funding from European investors Index Ventures, whose General Partners Neil Rimer and Danny Rimer also joined Last.fm's board of directors, consisting of Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Stefan Glaenzer (Chair).
Features
User accounts
The free user account includes access to all the main features listed below. Registered Users are also able to post in the Last.fm forums, send and receive private messages and use the Last.fm client music player.
- Profile: A Last.fm User can build up a musical profile using any or all of several methods: by listening to their personal music collection on a music player application on a computer or an iPod with an Audioscrobbler plugin, or by listening to the Last.fm internet radio service, either with the Last.fm client, or with the embedded flash player. All songs played are added to a log from which personal top artist/track bar charts and musical recommendations are calculated. They call this automatic track logging scrobbling.
- Last.fm automatically generates a profile page for every user which includes basic information such as their user name, avatar, date of registration and total number of tracks played. This can be customised with additional information or photographs if desired but the fundamental layout cannot be changed. There is also a Shoutbox for public messages. Profile pages are visible to all, together with a list of top artists and tracks, and the 10 most recently played tracks. Each user's profile has a 'Taste-o-Meter' which gives a rating of how compatible your music taste is.
- Profile pages can also include lists of friends, weekly musical "neighbours", favourite tags, groups and events. An optional customisable playlist may be also added, with tracks that the user wishes to share or promote. Other features include the ability to remove songs listened to within a 2 week time-frame, navigation to linked profiles (such as friends and musical neighbours) and a list of individual users' favourite albums.
- A customisable display of Recently Played tracks, is now available via web services, allowing users to add them to blogs, MySpace or as forum signatures.
- Recommendations: The most recent expanded service on Last.fm is a revamped known as "The Dashboard". This is only visible to the user concerned and lists suggested new music, events, journal entries and other people with similar tastes, all tailored to the user's own preferences.
- Recommendations are calculated using a collaborative filtering algorithm so users can browse and hear previews of a list of artists not listed on their own profile but which appear on those of others with similar musical tastes. The page also lists music that has been directly recommended to the user and groups the user belongs to, journals written by users about artists the user listens to, and other users who have listened to similar music recently. There is also a 'recommendation radio' station which will play music specifically filtered based on the user's last week of listening. Last.fm also permits users to manually recommend specific artists, songs or albums to other users on their friends list or groups they belong to, providing the recommendation in question is included in the Last.fm database.
- Groups: Last.fm allows the formation of user groups between users with something in common (for example, fans of an artist, a genre of music, or membership of another internet forum). Groups may be linked to artists and countries. Any user may start a group and add members. Most groups are open to all, but membership may be subject to approval by the Group Leader. Last.fm will generate a group profile similar to the users' profiles, showing an amalgamated set of data and charting the group's overall tastes. Individual groups have their own discussion forums and journal space, and a group radio station based on members' music profiles is automatically generated once a sufficient number of members have joined. Group members are also able to submit recommendations of artists or tracks to all the other members of their group.
- Events : With the October 2006 update, 'events'-functionality was added, which lets users specify a location and a radius from the location, then suggests gigs or festivals that that user may want to see in the area. Users can set themselves as attending an event.
- Any registered user may add a new venue or event which will then be listed on the band or artist's main page, together with other details if available. There is also a facility to submit reviews and photographs of past events.
Subscriber accounts
Last.fm offers paid accounts, costing £1.50, €2.50, $3 or ¥350 per month. Some of the extra features that paid users receive are:
- More radio options (custom user playlists and loved tracks radio)
- The ability to view recent visitors to one's own profile page
- Priority on Last.fm server
Artist pages
Once an artist has had a track or tracks "scrobbled" by at least one User, Last.fm automatically generates a main artist page, even if there is no music available for streaming on the radio. This page shows details of the total number of plays, the total number of listeners, the most popular weekly and overall tracks, the top weekly listeners, linked groups and journals, a list of similar artists, most popular tags and a shoutbox for messages. There are also links to events, additional album and individual track pages and similar artists radio. If the artist has music available for streaming or download an embedded flash player is also included with samples of the most popular tracks.
Official music videos and other videos imported from YouTube may also be viewed on the relevant artist and track pages.
Users may add relevant biographical details and other information to any artist's main page in the form of a Wiki. Edits are regularly moderated to prevent vandalism. A photograph of the artist may also be added. If more than one is submitted, the most popular is chosen by public vote. User submitted content is licensed for use under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last.fm currently cannot disambiguate artists with the same name; a single artist profile is shared between valid artists with the same name.
Music catalogue
Last.fm's music library contains well over 3.5 million individual audio tracks from artists on all the major commercial labels. Users are not allowed to upload copyrighted audio files but commercially available albums are regularly added by Last.fm staff. Most currently popular and other well known artists have tracks available for streaming, although there are significant gaps in coverage and the most recent releases are not always added immediately. The music catalogue includes a wide variety of genres including classical, opera and musicals, as well as many little known and specialist recordings which are no longer generally available.
In February 2007 Warner Music, the world's third-largest music company, announced that it had signed a deal to allow its entire catalogue to be played on Last.fm. Warner's music would be made available over Last.fm's service in Europe and North America. The site's co-founder, Martin Stiksel, said they were also in talks with the other three major labels and content holders. However in June 2008 Warner cancelled its deal with last.fm and removed all Warner artists from the site's on demand streaming catalogue, Warner have indicated that they are in disagreement over the financial compensation offered by last.fm.
On 9 July 2007, it was announced that Last.fm had also signed a deal with the Sony BMG record label. The partnership will give the service's users access to the entire Sony BMG catalogue of music.
Independent artists and record labels
Independent record labels and unsigned artists are encouraged to promote their music on Last.fm, because the filtering and recommendation features mean that the music will be played for users who already like similar artists. Labels and artists can upload their own music for streaming and Last.fm provides access to weekly airplay statistics, with facilities for promoting individual artists or tracks. Labels and artists may choose whether their music is to be made available for streaming only, or for purchase or free download.
Previews and free downloads
30-second previews of any of the stream-able tracks are available on demand, from anywhere in the site, by clicking on the grey arrow next to the name of the track or artist. Some tracks are also available to preview in full if the label or artist has specifically authorized it; these are indicated by black arrows. (All tracks are played in full when users listen to appropriate stations).
In October 2006, Last.fm brought back its free download service which allowed users to download select tracks as specified by the artist or the label. The service only includes tracks on "indie" labels or by bands who upload their own material, although some artists who have since moved onto a major label (such as Coheed and Cambria and My Chemical Romance) have kept their free songs available for download. More than 100,000 songs are currently downloadable, and there is a separate free download chart, updated weekly, showing the 200 most popular tracks.
On 23 January 2008, Last.fm changed its business model with the Free the Music initiative. Most tracks and albums can be streamed from the website free of charge up to three times. The artists are paid each time the track is played. This service is still in beta mode and free on demand listening is currently only available to users in the US, UK and Germany.
Tags
With the August 2005 relaunch, Last.fm supports user-end tagging or labelling of artists, albums, and tracks to create a site-wide folksonomy of music. Users can browse via tags, but the most important benefit is tag radio, permitting users to play music that has been tagged a certain way. This tagging can be by genre (""), mood (""), artist characteristic (""), or any other form of user-defined classification (""). However, since tagging is not moderated, it is prone to manipulation by the site's users, most often resulting in genre disagreements among users or pushing certain artists higher up on certain tag charts.
Subscribers are also able to create personal tag radio stations containing only tracks and artists that they have tagged themselves. All tag radio stations (including subscriber's personal tag stations) can be played by anybody, including non-subscribers.
Charts
One particular feature of Last.fm is the automatic weekly generation and archiving of detailed personal music charts and statistics which are created as part of its profile building. Users have several different charts available, including Top Artists, Top Tracks, and Top Albums, as well as Weekly Top Artists and Weekly Top Tracks. Each of these charts is based on the actual number of people listening to the track, album or artist recorded either through an Audioscrobbler plugin or the Last.fm radio stream.
Additionally, charts are available for the top tracks by each artist in the Last.fm system as well as the top tracks for individual albums (when the tagging information of the audio file is available). Artist profiles also keep track of a short list of Top Fans, which is calculated by a formula meant to portray the importance of an artist in a fan's own profile, balancing out users who play hundreds of tracks overall versus those who play only a few.
As the information generated is largely compiled from the ID3 data from audio files "scrobbled" from user's own computers, and which may be incorrect or misspelled, there are many errors in the listings. Tracks with ambiguous punctuation are especially prone to separate listings, which can dilute the apparent popularity of a track. Artists or bands with the same name are not always differentiated. The system does attempt to translate some different artist tags to a single artist profile, but does not attempt to harmonise track names.
Charts are also available for user groups, thus providing a view into a demographic slice, and can reveal interesting new music based on the preferences of similar users.
The Last.fm artist charts currently do not take track length into consideration. For example, an album with 22 short tracks will boost that artist's popularity for a particular user's rankings much more than an album with only five long tracks, even though the user spent the same amount of time listening to each. The impact of this problem is limited to personal charts. All other charts are calculated using reach, that is, the number of users who play a certain artist or track, rather than the total number of plays. This is also a defence against users who in the early days of Audioscrobbler submitted spam data in order to boost the rankings of a particular artist or song or their own ranking as a fan.
Global charts
Last.fm generates of the top 400 artists and tracks listened to by all Last.fm users. To prevent the artificial boosting of an artist or song by deliberately repeated tracks from a single listener, these charts are based on the total number of individual listeners (the reach) and not the number of actual plays.
The result is notably different from traditional commercial music charts provided by the UK Top 40, Billboard magazine, Soundscan and others, which are based on radio plays or sales. Last.fm charts are less volatile and a new album's release may be reflected in play data for many months or years after it drops out of commercial charts. For example, The Beatles have consistently been a top 5 band at Last.fm, reflecting the continued popularity of the band's music irrespective of current album sales.
The Global Tag Chart shows the 100 most popular tags that have been used to describe artists, albums, and tracks. This is based on the total number of times the tag has been applied by Last.fm users since the tagging system was first introduced and does not necessarily reflect the number of users currently listening to any of the related "global tag radio" stations.
Last.fm radio
Last.fm offers customised "radio stations" consisting of uninterrupted audio streams of individual tracks selected from the music files in the music library.
Stations can be based on the user's personal profile, the user's "musical neighbours", or the tracks that the user has marked as loved when listening to any station. Groups based around common interests or geography also have radio stations if there are enough members, and tags also have radio stations if enough music has the same tag. Radio stations can also be created on the fly, and each artist page allows selection of a "similar artists" or "artist fan" radio station. (As of December 2006, it is no longer possible to create a "multiple artist" station i.e. a station based on music similar to that of more than one artist. Last.fm has cited copyright restrictions as the reason for this change.
Under the terms of the station's radio licence, listeners may not select specific tracks (except as previews), or choose the order in which they are played, although any of the tracks played may be skipped or banned completely. The appropriate royalties are paid to the copyright holders of all streamed audio tracks according to the law in the UK.
The radio stream uses an MP3 stream encoded at 128 kbit/s 44.1 kHz, which may be played using the in-page flash player or the downloaded Last.fm client, but other community-supported players are available as well as a proxy which allows using a media player of choice.
As part of a recent programme of improvements in February 2007, registered users are also able to export the Last.fm Flash player to embed into blogs, personal websites, Facebook or MySpace pages.
Last.fm player
An "in-page" Flash-based player is provided automatically for all listeners; it is not necessary to download additional software in order to listen to any of the music available from the Last.fm music library. It is necessary, however, to download the Last.fm client if a user also wishes information about played tracks from their own digital music collection to be included in their personal music profile.
Prior to August 2005, Last.fm generated an open stream that could be played in the user's music player of choice, with a browser-based player control panel. This proved difficult to support and has been officially discontinued. The Last.fm client is currently the only officially supported music player for playing customised Last.fm radio streams. The current version combines the functions of the music player with the plugin that transmits all track data to the Last.fm server, and effectively replaces the separate Last.fm Player and the standalone track submission plugins. It is also free software licensed under the GNU General Public License and available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The player allows the user to enter the name of any artist or tag which then gives a choice of a number of similar artist stations, or similar global tag stations. Alternatively, Recommendation radio or any of the user's personal radio stations may be played without the necessity to visit the website.
The player displays the name of the station and track currently playing, the song artist, title and track length as well as album details, the artist's photo and biographical details, album cover art when available, lists of similar artists and the most popular tags and top fans. There are several buttons, allowing the user to love, skip, or ban a song. The love button adds the song to the user's loved tracks playlist; the ban button ensures that the song will not be played again. Both features affect the user's profile. The skip button does not. Other buttons allow the user to tag or recommend the currently playing track. Other features offered by the application are: minor editing of the user's profile including removing recently played artists and songs from the loved, banned, or previously played track lists; lists of friends and neighbours, lists of tags and a list of previously played radio stations. Users can also open their full Last.fm profile page directly from the player.
The client also enables the user to install player plugins, these integrate with various standalone media players to allow the submission of tracks played in those programs.
In the latest version of the Last.fm Player application, the user can select to use an external player. When this is done, the Last.fm Player provides the user with a local URL, through which the Last.fm music stream is proxied. Users can then open the URL in their preferred media player.
Audioscrobbler plugin
Last.fm can optionally build a profile directly from a user's music played on their personal computer. Users must download and install a plugin for their music player, which will automatically submit the artist and title of the song after either half the song or the first four minutes have played, whichever comes first. When the track is shorter than 30 seconds (31 seconds in iTunes) or the track lacks metadata (ID3, CDDB, etc), the track is not submitted. To accommodate dial-up users, caching of the data and submitting it in bulk is also possible.
List of supported media players
Following applications have native support for sending song information:
The following services support sending service-specific recently-played track feeds:
Plugins are available for the following applications:
Supported audio players (hardware)
There is some support for portable audio players. Since these are off-line (which breaks the Last.fm concept), track info has to be batch scrobbled.
Players for which batch upload software is available:
- iPod: The most recent version of the Last.fm software for Windows and Mac (introduced in May 2008) features iPod scrobbling. Although this was introduced in a previous version of Last.fm many users had complained that such features had ceased to function in recent updates.
- Rhythmbox's plugin supports iPod scrobbling
- Rockbox replacement firmware
- foobar2000 (Windows) Plugins foo_dop and foo_audioscrobbler combined.
- iPod Touch and iPhone: With iPod touch and iPhone's firmware version 2.0, Last.fm has created an official client for streaming its music. Alternatively, through the process of Jailbreaking your iPod Touch/iPhone, MobileScrobbler can both stream radio and scrobble tracks via Wi-Fi or an EDGE/3G mobile connection.
- Frontier Silicon-based connected audio devices.
- Various other players: supported with the Rockbox firmware - logs made by these players can be uploaded to Last.fm using third party software. Such software includes the web based dap-scrob, and the GUI based Qt4 program QTScrobbler
- Zenses is an open source utility program for MTP compatible devices such as iriver clix, Toshiba's Gigabeat line, SanDisk's Sansa series, Samsung's YP series, Microsoft Zune, & Creative's Zen players. It lets you submit play counts from the player to Last.fm, view charts on what you've played and create recently added playlists. Zenses was designed and developed for use with Creative's Zen Vision:M media player; however it should also work with most other MTP compatible devices. The development of any further release has been stopped.
- TrekStor Vibez with scrobbler It'sGotTheVibez
All Audioscrobbler plugins are open source and the listening data it collects is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. The data is available from Last.fm's Audioscrobbler site.
Other third party applications
Last.fm supported applications
As of March 2008, the website has added a section titled "Build" where third party applications can be submitted for review, and then posted to the page.
Last.fm partnered up with the SXSW festival by creating an application embedded in the corresponding that filters the various artists at the festival by a user's listening statistics, and then uses Last.fm's recommendation service to also suggest other performing artists that said user hasn't listened to.
Other applications
- LastFmLib.net (LGPL) for using the Last.fm web services in VB.Net/C#
- Last.fm Java bindings (BSD) for using the Last.fm web services in Java
- Last.fm recent tracks widget for Mac OS X displays a user's most recently played tracks.
- Last.fm widget for Opera also displays a user's most recently played tracks, but works on all platforms Opera runs on.
- Last.fm dashboard widget for Mac OS X displays a user's last messages in his/her shoutbox.
- last.tweet widget for Mac OS X displays the cover art of the recently played track, with Twitter integration.
- FoxyTunes Firefox extension places Last.fm player controls and current song information on the browser status bar.
- Local.fm creates Last.fm-style playlists using a local music collection and information from Last.fm.
- ExitAhead finds music on eBay matching a Last.fm profile.
- Last-Stats shows a user's stats and creates dynamic profile/chart images based on a user's Last.fm profile.
- The Hype Machine can scrobble songs you are listening to on the Hype Machine web-site.
Similar services
See also
Further reading
- , Rockbites, 22 July 2003
- , Wired, 7 July 2003
- , on Audioscrobbler, BBC News online, 27 March 2003
- , Audio presentation by CEO Felix Miller, IT Conversations, 7 March 2006
- , Interview with Last.fm co-founder, Martin Stiksel, , 18 October 2006
- , Guardian Unlimited Interview with Last.fm co-founder, Martin Stiksel, , 4 November 2006
- , BBC News on CBS takeover of Last.fm
External links
|
| |
|
|
