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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That distinction exists out in conceptual space, yes. But I am not sure Last.fm falls on the right side of it.
A startup can only live on "hey that's cool" for so long, when the promise of all these new ways of interacting is itself suggestive enough to capture people's imaginations even if it happens not to be very useful.
But soon we get acclimated, and even bored. And to keep pace with the ever-receding limit of human curiosity there must be some combination of new innovation and enduring usefulness, if not just one or the other.
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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..
> 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.
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 ).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.