7 posts tagged “last.fm”

I'm not one of those people that gets super bummed just because one of my favorite sites is purchased by a giant, wealth-maximizing behemoth. Social networking sites, especially media-intensive sites, cost a lot of money to run. They need bandwidth, top employees, new features, and finally, tons of cash, if they're going to pay the crippling royalties now required to run a commercial Web radio station. CBS has the deep pockets to keep Last.fm flourishing.

But I do hope CBS, the new owner of Last.fm, doesn't get too much in the way over there. Last.fm has become one of my favorite places on the Interweb, and I'd hate to leave if new ownership brings the suck. They've not announced any major changes so far:

Music sales aren't a big part of the financial picture so far, and they might not be even when CBS takes control. The minimal advertising on the site, however, will be beefed up. CBS envisions channels for music backed by corporate sponsors that will pay for the privilege every month.

CBS also plans to put versions of its existing radio programming on the website.

"We see it as a chance to get new eyeballs — or in this case earlobes," said a CBS executive familiar with the deal who spoke on condition of anonymity because it had not yet been announced.

I'm not too worried. Part of the reason CBS bought Last.fm is that it's got the most users by far of social music sites. They don't want to kill what made their property so valuable in the first place. It's not like there aren't plenty of competitors. iLike, Mog, and imeem are all very popular as well. Any buzz killing changes CBS introduces would lose all those new earlobes pretty quickly.
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UPDATE: Richard Jones just updated the Last.fm blog with an explanation of the acquisition and some thoughts on what will happen next:

• The Last.fm team stays put in London, we’ll grow the company some more here.
• We will continue to execute our world domination plans – our focus is still music and the surrounding ecosystem. The founders (myself included) are still at the helm.
• We have more resources at our disposal now, and more clout when it comes to negotiating licensing deals etc.
• OH NOES UR SELLIN MY SCROBBLES!!1!! — Don’t panic. The openness of our platform and our approach to privacy won’t change.

Instead, you're reading this. Last night, I saw Yo La Tengo for the first time in 6 1/2 years. That's how long it had been since their last time in Houston (and you know I don't go anywhere else). I wrote a review of YLT's 2000 show for Space City Rock. Six years ago I was underwhelmed. Last night, my favorite band in the world reminded why they've been my fave since 1993. The show was nicely balanced between lengthy psych-rock jams and brief, softly sung pop gems. They played quite a few songs from I am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, while mostly avoiding the two preceding albums (Summer Sun, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out). They did draw heavily from older records, opening with "Double Dare" from 1993's Painful, and adding "Autumn Sweater" and "We're An American Band" from I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. They even played two from 1990's Facebook.

The only crappy thing about last nights show were a few fans near the front of the stage who kept yelling during the quiet songs and acting like jerks. According to BDM, there was one fan who was yelling all night and giving the "thumbs down" signal every time the band launched into a soft-rock number. Another dude, who was standing near us actually managed to provoke Jordan into telling him to shut up. Now, you know that guy was being an ass.

Anyway, I took some photos, and they're available on my Flickr page. Unfortunately, my best photo was one I took of Times New Viking, the lackluster amateur openers.

times_new_viking4

Speaking of photos, I thought this was worth mentioning again. Last.fm allows you to tag your Flickr photos with a unique, show-specific event tag they give you. Then, Last.fm will automatically pull your photos and display them on a custom page generated just for that show. The Last.fm page for last night's Yo La Tengo show is here, and if you scroll down you'll notice photos from the show (taken by me and others) have already been retrieved. You can see the photos on Flickr here. The implications of this feature are breathtaking, if you ask me. Every show has its own page, and all the photos are in one place. Each show page also has its own message board. For real, Last.fm might be the most useful social networking site there is.

Flickr

This post attacking Virb raises a number of stinging, and I think legitimate, criticisms of the nascent, would-be Myspace killer. In his post titled "10 Reasons virb sucks big time," Michael Kamleitner gives voice to a number of misgivings I've had myself:

• virb is not open - in fact it’s way more sealed up than Myspace ever was. virb currently supports external flash-content from YouTube, Google and a few other approved popular service only. compare that to the widget-ecosystem which has emerged around Myspace for the past 2 years. bidirectional content syndication from and to social networks might turn out crucial. it will be exciting to see Myspace’ anticipated/dreaded policy shifts in 2007.
• virb is hard to syndicate - I haven’t found a single RSS-feed yet. not even on my personal blog (c’Mon, even myspace offers RSS-feeds, though without full content)
• virb ain’t valid - agreed, virb’s code is lightyears ahead of Myspace’s, but does it validate against current web-standards? not really.
• virb is poorly communicating itself - I was suprised that virb isn’t using the merits of blogging to communicate with its userbase.
• virb is a silo - there is currently no way (i.e. API) to get data out of a virb-account (except of course by content-scraping). since social networking is almost commoditized (check People Aggregator or Ning) by now, and most users have realized they want to be part of numerous networks instead of one monolithic, this is probably a bad move.
• but most of all: virb is a lonely place (currently only 35 users based in Austria). sure, it’s kinda unfair to compare a service just started with Myspace’ community of +100mio users. but in the end, size-of-community is exactly the key-feature of any closed down, centralized social network as is virb or Myspace.

        (ok, that was only 7 issues, sorry for cheating on the headline )

Excepting the ridiculous criticism of Virb's small size, I think some of these criticisms are dead on, and I love Virb. The two biggies for me are the lack of support for additional "approved" flash services & the lack of communication with users. Yes, Flash widgets have their security issues, but Virb has been less than proactive about approving additional sources, and most widgets in wide use on Myspace (e.g., Twitter, Slide) are safe as milk. A cynical user might wonder whether Virb is just worried about cannibalizing their own offerings. For example, how likely are they to approve Last.fm widgets, when Virb offers their own competing feature. Their reluctance is not entirely unsurprising, but Virb isn't going to compete with Myspace by offering less flexibility.

Much of the skepticism might be alleviated if Virb had a conventional beta blog that addressed user questions regarding upcoming functionality. There is a group on Virb that solicits user feedback, but I've seen nary on official Virbster writing in response. Communication with users of a new service is paramount if you want to retain their tenuous loyalty. As big a Virb fan as I am, I still think Facebook is better, offering more useful features and excellent communication with readers.

Okay, but does Virb really suck? Nah. This list of features literally counts the ways in which the site is better than Myspace. And Virb is still new enough that users are willing to give them a pass while they roll out additional features and functionality. But they need to be careful not to spoil the honeymoon.

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EDIT: Turns out Virb does have a group for its developers. But they're not really using it to talk about what's happening at Virb. Actually, they're not using it at all.

You probably noticed that Last.fm got a cosmetic overhaul last week, but there's also something new under the hood.  The changes might make Last.fm the last showlist you'll ever need. Now, concert listings have their own home on the site called "Events." Clicking on link reveals some interesting new features. First, you can now search for concerts anywhere in the world. Second, Last.fm can now import photos from Flickr, and automatically associate those photos with a specific event. Below, we'll go through the new features, and a few of the older ones to see what makes these new features the best show list ever.

Use the search function to search for events by city. You can narrow your search by artist, venue, or even a particular festival. For people who are going out of town and want to catch a few shows, this tool is invaluable.

By_city

By default, you'll see listings for your hometown. You can narrow your search by venue. The number of included venues is impressive. Note that the venues with the most listed shows are shown on the left and in larger type.

By_venue

You can also view shows by date. Clicking on the show will take you to the event's page, where you'll see more information about the venue and the band. You'll also be able to see profiles for all the Last.fm members who have indicated they're attending.

By_date

Poster

Last.fm will display related shows in a left-hand sidebar. Upcoming shows by the same band, or other shows at the same venue will appear.

Related_events

Perhaps the coolest new feature is the integration with Flickr. After the show is over, you can upload your photos of the event to Flickr. When you're uploading the photos, apply a bulk tag to the whole set using the Last.fm event tag (e.g., "lastfm:event=123456"). Last.fm will grab the photos and put them on the page for that event. You can share the photos with everyone else who went to the event, but you only have to upload once.

Flickr

I don't think there's been anything else like Last.fm. Certainly there are event calendars like Upcoming.org. And Myspace allows artists and venues to display their show calendars. But Last.fm has a huge user base of passionate music lovers. Now those users can find the music and the tour dates in one place, and not just for one artist, but every artist (even artists and venues not registered on the site). And of course, you can still see what shows your pals are attending. It's just another amazingly useful feature from a site that's full of wonderous innovations. I love you, Last.fm.

Attending

My pal Jac asked me to put together a list of my 25 favorite/most useful Web sites.* Of course, I agreed, being the Internet dork that I am. I had planned to put together a list of each site along with a short blurb describing the sites and explaining why I liked each one. Very quickly, I realized my planned post was quite a chore and would take me much longer than I anticipated.

In the interest of time, I've posted a quick reference list below. The sites aren't in any particular order, but I have grouped them together in a few rough categories.  In the future, I'll write about each of these sites in more detail. These posts will be tagged top sites on my Vox blog (and the sites below are tagged on Del.icio.us), so you can find them easily. Some of these services I've already written about, and I'll update the tags accordingly. I've written little or nothing about most of these, but I encourage you to check them out anyway.

Please, if you have a question, or you think there's a site better than the one I've listed, let me know. I'm interested to see what you think.

1. Google Reader
2. Netvibes
3. Yahoo! Pipes
4. Flickr
5. Snipshot
6. Meebo
7. Twitter
8. Del.icio.us
9. Scrapbook
10. Google Docs and Spreadsheets
11. Scribd
12. Digg
13. Metafilter
14. Google Calendar
15. Remember The Milk
16. Virb
17. Facebook
18. Vox
19. MeeVee
20. Emusic
21. Allmusic & Allmovie
22. Metacritic
23. Pandora
24. Last.fm
25. MediaFire

Coming Soon

These sites aren't open to the public yet, but both are pretty compelling. To see why, click on the links and view the demo videos.

• Zoho Notebook
• iScrybe

Duh

These are Web sites you should already know about. If you're smart, you're already using them.

• Gmail. The most storage, POP3 access (for both Gmail and other accounts), integrated chat, lightning fast search, filters and labels that are easy to set up. It's the best e-mail you can buy. Only it's free, even the "premium features" Yahoo! and Hotmail make you pay extra for.
• Netflix. There is no other way to rent movies. True, my account is on pause, but that's only because I don't have time to watch movies. If I did, I'd be using Netflix.
• Craigslist. Before I'd buy or sell anything on Ebay, I'd look here. I check the musical instruments listings EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
• YouTube. They're getting attacked from all sides, but this is still the best place to find online videos. Viewers who want a reliable place to find Comedy Central & VH1 clips are better served by using iFilm (Be aware that the site may soon be rebranded as the online home of Spike TV).
• Wikipedia. Andrew Morgan alerted me to the a swell Wikipedia feature the other day. Set your homepage to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, then every time you open your browser, you'll be treated to a randomly generated entry on Wikipedia.

Lots of people already know about Pandora. This Web casting service from the Music Genome Project lets you choose a song or artist as a starting point. Then, it plays a stream of similar music, much of which you've never heard before. I've been a big fan for quite some time, and I don't think there's a better way to discover new music that you'll actually enjoy.

Except maybe now there is.

I'll explain. Pandora's open API has given developers an opportunity to mix and match music services. For example, Pandora.fm is a mash-up of Last.fm and Pandora. You can listen to Pandora as you normally would, but if you input your Last.fm account information, the songs you hear are submitted to your Last.fm playlist. You can also "tag"  the songs as you submit them. Unfortunately, my experience with the site has been mixed. More often than not, my songs don't actually submit to Last.fm. Since that's kinda the point, it's tough to recommend the site. But try it out. It might work a little better for you than it did for me.

A Pandora mash-up I've had better luck with is the Emusic/Pandora hybrid. Again, Pandora works as it normally does: pick a song or band, and you hear similar tunes. In addition, Emusic runs a search for the artist, album, or song that's currently playing and finds it on Emusic. This is pretty useful if you find an unknown artist you like and they turn out to be on Emusic. It doesn't always work. Sometimes, there isn't a match. This is usually because the artist isn't on Emusic. But sometimes, the Artist is on Emusic and the search turns up something completely unrelated. For example, when Pandora played Sonic Youth, I got an album called "Dumbdown" by Idiotchild. That didn't make much sense because there's plenty of Sonic Youth on Emusic. Normally, though, it pulls up the appropriate artist.

Emusicpandora

Finally, Pandora has added some personal features that allow you to bookmark your favorite songs and artists as they play. You can even add your friends and see what radio stations, songs, and artists they've been listening to. It's not the fanciest thing you've ever seen, but it's supremely useful given Pandora's core purpose You can find my Pandora profile here. But don't get too attached. Royalty rates for Webcasters are going up dramatically, and Pandora is signaling that the new rates may be too much for the service to bear.

Pandora

Virb

Virb is a new site that's competing with Myspace head on. That's right. They're not making widgets for you to put on Myspace. They're not giving you code to help you spruce up Myspace. Instead, they've built a new site from the ground up. Their ambition? To be a better Myspace (and Facebook and Last.fm). They don't just want to compete, they want to win.

They're not doing it piecemeal either. Today, they opened the site up to the public and nearly everything is working right now: fully customizable profile pages, video and photo sharing with generous upload limits, separate pages for bands (with beautiful flash players), interoperability with 3rd party widgets, blogs, and robust search functionality. A full list of features, including some that are coming soon, is available here.

I could write all day about this site, but I'll start small. Here are five things the company seems to have done right the first time, right out of the box. Note that I'm not going into much detail. That will have to come later, in future posts.

1. Perfect balance. Virb has managed to what many have thought impossible. Make a feature-rich, coherently-designed site that is also super customizable. They wanted to build a site that avoided much of the ugliness for which Myspace is notorious, and yet they knew people wouldn't accept a competitor that didn't let users tinker with their, uh, spaces. Well, Virb is gorgeous and "dripping with AJAX." It has a ton of features Myspace users have begged for, and yet it gives users considerable power and discretion in building their (much more) beautiful pages (e.g., here, here, here, & here).  That's not to say you can't still build an eyesore. But there's one more thing: Virb lets you "turn off customization" for individual pages when a pal has simply gone overboard in tricking out their page. Genius!
2. Plays well with others. First, you can sync with Flickr. Hallelujah on that alone. But that's not where it ends. They allow users to create custom modules, which retain the general size of the disparate modules on the site, but which also allow you to insert your own HTML code or third party widgets from approved sites (e.g., You Tube, Google, Brightcove, Revver, Vimeo, Odeo, Metacafe, Veoh). Like Myspace, they don't let users insert Javascript. But flash-based widgets seem to work okay. Finally, they're planning to let users import their own blogs via RSS. That feature isn't live yet, but it's hugely important if they want to attract new users weary of Myspace's "lock-in" mentality.
3. Not afraid to borrow ideas. Some of Virb's best features appear to be cribbed from other sites, and that's a very good thing. For example, Virbtunes is an iTunes plug-in that logs your tracks as you play them and posts them on your profile page. It works just like Last.fm. It doesn't have Last.fm's enormous feature set, but it's already smart enough to identify bands who have a Virb profile and provide an autolink to their page. Another useful feature comes from Facebook: after you log into Virb, your homepage displays your "recent friend activity." Whenever your friends add photos, videos, blogposts, or songs, a notification shows up on your homepage. It's very similar to Facebook's mini-feed, but it avoids some of the controversy that feature spawned. Virb doesn't tell you about interactions among friends.
   

   Recent Friend Activity
4. Media isn't an afterthought, it's Virb's central nervous system. Take a look at Virb's home page, and their pages for video and music. Everything about the site says it's built to run on media. That image transfers to the content and features on the site. Virb is going after Myspace's core competency in music. Hard. The site's founders, Unborn Media, previously brought you PureVolume, a kind of Web 2.0 version of MP3.com. Now, bands can get a Virb site that ports over a killer feature set from PureVolume. The resulting artist pages are so pretty, we're not sure PureVolume is even necessary anymore. Take a look at this page for Bloc Party, or this one for Finland's Day Eleven, and you'll see what I mean. A lot of bands are going to flock to Virb. Bands like The Decemberists, Mastodon, Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, and The Hold Steady are already on Virb at launch. Users don't get left out. They can add as many as 15 songs from different artists to create their own custom player. And as for Video, Virb is the first site I've seen to launch WIDESCREEN video that can be embedded anywhere. And with the click of a button, you can dim the rest of the screen for maximum enjoyment. Are you starting to get amazed?
5. Search and you shall find. Virb makes it easy to find what you're looking for. Myspace veterans know that's not a small thing. Virb has a speedy search function that crawls the whole site and returns results in discrete categories (e.g., people, blogs, music, video). Tagging is actively encouraged, and damn near everything can be tagged, including your friends. This fixes one of my biggest complaints about Myspace: once you had about 200 friends or more, it became impossible to find them again. While Virb doesn't let you search your friends (yet), you can tag them any way you wish, and then filter them accordingly (e.g., work, school, home, golfing buddies). This is made easier by the fact that Virb allows you to keep Organizations and Bands separate from your "People" friends. This is what social media is all about: finding people, sharing information, and staying in touch.

I'm not saying Virb is perfect. They're still adding features and tweaking the service. It's still in beta for chrissakes. A massive influx of users could still crash their servers. And even if everything goes right, they've still got to overcome the significant network effects advantage Myspace enjoys. Are people really going to bother with another social network, when they've invested so much into Myspace? Who knows. But I like Virb a lot. And they've got a good unofficial motto that I'm going to adopt.

I'm moving to Virb. Who's coming with me?

P.S., I'm starting a new Virb group on Vox. If you like Virb, join up!