Last.fm

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Last.fm
Last.fm main page
URL http://www.last.fm/
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Statistics & Community
Registration Free, or subscribe for £1.50 per month ($3 USD)
Owner Last.fm Ltd.
Created by Communal

Last.fm is an Internet radio station and music recommendation system that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by a Last.fm plugin installed into its users' music playing application. The profile is visible on a customizable web page, enhanced by limited social networking features, and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favorites.

Contents

[edit] History

Audioscrobbler began as a computer science project by Richard Jones while he attended the University of Southampton 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, Michael Breidenbruecker and Thomas Willomitzer, all from Austria and Germany, as an internet radio station and music community site, using similar music profiles to generate dynamic playlists. The 'love' and 'ban' buttons allowed users to gradually customize their profiles. Last.fm won the Europrix 2002 and was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica in 2003.[1]

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. On August 9, 2005, the old Audioscrobbler site at the audioscrobbler.com domain name was wholly merged into the new Last.fm site. On September 5, 2005, audioscrobbler.net was launched as a development-oriented site.

On July 14, 2006, an update to the site was made. This update included a new software application for playing Last.fm radio streams and for logging of tracks played with other media players. Other changes included: 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 color scheme). Reaction to the new visual design has been mixed among the community, including objections to a delay in providing support for Internet Explorer 7 while that application remains in beta. On July 15, 2006, a Japanese version of the site was launched.

In October 2006, the site won Best Community Music Site at the BT Digital Music Awards, and in January 2007 it was nominated for Best Website in the NME Awards.

Currently, the site is available in various other languages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean and Simplified Chinese.

As of December 2006, Last.fm teamed up with EMI on Tuneglue-Audiomap [1].

[edit] Features

A Last.fm user can build up a musical profile using two methods: by listening to their personal music collection on a music player application with an Audioscrobbler plugin, or by listening to the Last.fm internet radio service, usually with the Last.fm client. 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. The user's page also displays Recently Played tracks, and these are available via web services, allowing users to display them on blogs or as forum signatures.

Recommendations are calculated using a collaborative filtering algorithm so users can browse a list of artists not listed on their own profile but that which appear on those of others with similar musical tastes. Last.fm also permits users to manually recommend specific artists, songs or albums to other users (as long as the recommendation in question is included in the Last.fm database).

Perhaps the most-used community feature within Last.fm is the formation of user groups between users with something in common (for example, membership of another internet forum). 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.

Record labels and 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. Last.fm music stock contains more than 100,000 songs available for free download.[2]

In February 2007 Warner Music, the world's fourth-largest music company, announced that it had signed a deal to allow its entire catalogue to be played on Last.fm.[3] Warner's music will shortly be made available over Last.fm's service in the U.S. and Europe. The site's co-founder, Martin Stiksel, said they were also in talks with the other three major labels and content holders.

[edit] Previews

As with many music sites, 30-second previews of many tracks are available on demand. These are indicated on the site by blue arrows. Some tracks are also made available to preview in full, If the label or artist has specifically authorized it; these are indicated by gold arrows. All tracks can be heard in full when users listen to appropriate stations.

[edit] Recommendations

The most recent expanded service on Last.fm is a revamped personal recommendations page. The page 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. Users' profiles have a 'Taste-o-Meter' which gives a rating of how compatible your music taste is.

[edit] Tags

With the August 2005 relaunch, Last.fm supports user-end tagging 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 ("garage rock"), mood ("chill"), artist characteristic ("baritone"), or any other form of user-defined classification ("seen live").

[edit] 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.

[edit] Free downloads

In the October update, 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 material themselves; 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.

[edit] Paid accounts

Last.fm offers paid accounts, costing $3, €2,50, £1.50 or ¥350 per month. Some of the extra features that paid users receive are:

  • No advertisements
  • More radio options (custom radio stations for a user and loved tracks radio)
  • The ability to view recent visitors to one's own profile page
  • Beta testing at beta.last.fm
  • User icon changes color from black to blue, and states "Subscriber"

[edit] Other

Other features include the ability to remove songs listened to within a 2 week timeframe, navigation to linked profiles (such as friends and musical neighbors) and a list of individual users' favorite albums.

[edit] Charts

Last.fm creates many charts 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 plays 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 MP3 tagging information is available). The system does attempt to translate different artist tags to a single artist profile, but does not attempt to harmonize track names. Tracks with ambiguous punctuation are especially prone to separate listings, which can dilute the apparent popularity of a track. 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.

Charts are also available for user groups, which can be established around arbitrary criteria (e.g. fans of one band, fans of several related bands, fans of specific types of music, fans from specific geographic areas, users of particular operating systems or software). The charts for user groups thus provide 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 5 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 defense 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.

[edit] Global chart

Global Track Chart showing the top 10 tracks for the week ending September 3, 2006
Global Track Chart showing the top 10 tracks for the week ending September 3, 2006

There is a weekly global chart of top artists and top tracks played across all of Last.fm. This chart is notably different from traditional music charts provided by Billboard magazine, Soundscan, and others. The commercial charts measure radio plays or sales, but do not measure listeners or repeated listens.

Last.fm charts are less volatile and a new album's release will be reflected in play data for many months after it drops off 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 album sales, which long ago reached market saturation.

Another reason behind the differences is the particular demographic of the service's users. Last.fm users generally have an Internet connection, may be more computer-literate than average, and may have wide collections of music from which to choose, due to the ability to download MP3 files from the internet.

[edit] Last.fm radio

Last.fm offers customized radio stations. Stations can be based on the user's personal profile, the user's "musical neighbors", 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 based on a list of artists, 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 (a station based on more than one artist). It is only possible to create a station based on one artist. Last.fm have cited copyright restrictions as the reason for this change [2].

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 or MySpace pages. [3]

[edit] Last.fm client

Last.fm Player
Last.fm Player icon
Screen shot of the Last.fm player, playing Tom Petty.
Screen shot of the Last.fm player, playing Tom Petty.
Developer: Last.fm
Latest release: 1.1.3.0
OS: Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Unix-like
Use: media player
License: GNU General Public License
Website: http://www.last.fm/

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 customized Last.fm radio streams, it effectively replaces the 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 displays the song title, album, and artist, along with album cover art when available. There are three 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 controls include volume, stop, and options.

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.[4] 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; integrated tagging without the need for launching an external web browser; and the creation of custom radio stations based on multiple artists rather than a single artist.


[edit] Other players

  • LastFMProxy: a Python script written by Vidar Madsen, allows users to use their own music player again, by connecting to Last.fm and relaying its stream to the user's player of choice.
  • Online Last.fm Player: an open source PHP application made for listening to Last.fm radio streams on a webpage. It allows users who can't run or install any applications on their PC to listen to radio streams.
  • Rhythmbox: is able to play last.fm streams through its last.fm plugin as of version 0.9.7. It also supports submitting the track information of other tracks to the last.fm profile.
  • Amarok: has had the ability to play Last.fm streams integrated into the application as of version 1.4.1, and continues to support submitting information. Users of previous versions can play the streams using the LastamaroK script (homepage), which is based on LastFMProxy.
  • MyLastFM: an open source desktop client for the Windows platform which can play Last.fm streams or relay the streams to other music players (similar to LastFMProxy). It requires Microsoft .NET version 1.1 Framework.
  • Last Exit: an open source GTK+-based client similar to the official player. There are official deb packages for Debian [4] and Ubuntu [5] and there is also an unofficial package that let you save the song [6] Ubuntu forums thread about the save song patch.
  • Shell.FM: an open source console based player for Linux.
  • Amua: a small, open source client for Mac OS X that resides as a menu item.
  • PandoraFM: lets you listen to your customized Last.fm radio stations built by tagging within Pandora and the Last.fm web site. A web based, online Last.fm player.
  • StationRipper lets you record any Last.fm station.
  • TheLastRipper An opensource audio stream ripper for last.fm.

[edit] 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 seek controls are used, the track is shorter than 30 seconds (31 seconds in iTunes), or the track lacks metadata (ID3, CDDB, etc), the track is not submitted. This feature is available to dial-up users, as data is cached and submitted to Last.fm when an internet connection is established.

[edit] List of supported media players

Following applications have native support for sending song information:

Plugins are available for the following applications: [7]

[edit] Supported audio players (hardware)

There is some support for portable audio players. Since these are offline (which breaks the last.fm concept), track info has to be batch scrobbled. Players for which batch upload software is available:

All Audioscrobbler plugins are open source, and the listening data it collects were historically released under a Creative Commons License. Recently, however, due to Last.fm's financial interest in the data, it seems unlikely that further releases of data will be made. Indeed, no data is currently available from Last.fm's website, and the last public data were dated May 6, 2005.[5]

[edit] Other third party applications

[edit] Easter eggs

The Last.fm website has several easter eggs concealed within, relying on in-jokes:

  • A fake user page for David Hasselhoff, presented as if he were a member of the Last.fm development team, here (Hasselhoff's favorite track is the Knight Rider theme).
  • A fake artist page for Matthew Ogle, the real primary web developer for Last.fm, here. Ogle has a fake album page, From Alberta to the Albert, Live from the Hot Grapefruit Lounge, and even a fake fan club. The latter reports that a new album, made in collaboration with Hasselhoff, is about to be released. Ogle's fake songs are regularly scrobbled by users and staff members. Matt Ogle was captured on film performing a live rendition of Silent Night with his accordion in the Last.fm offices in December of 2006.
  • A fake artist page for Norman Casagrande, the chief music research honcho for Last.fm, here. Casagrande has a fake fan club devoted to him, and even a fake event page in which he appears to be performing alongside Ogle and Hasselhoff in the office's local pub. Norman's "hit" track is titled "Norman in da Casa Grande", which is a pun based on his name.
  • In listing the various services provided by signing up, it states that you receive a free pony. In reality, "Pony" was the codename for the site's recommendation system.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ EUROPRIX Student Award Winners 2002. EUROPRIX. Retrieved on 2006-09-03.
  2. ^ Last.fm October '06 Update. Retrieved on 2007-01-04.
  3. ^ Warner Music announces Last.fm content dealRetrieved February 13, 2007.
  4. ^ Jälevik, Erik (2006-04-03). Last.fm forum: Read this to get started (old beta!). Retrieved on 2006-09-03.
  5. ^ Data. Retrieved on 2006-12-06.

[edit] Further reading

[edit] Press

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../l/a/s/Last.fm.html"