Fancy A Scrobble? (last.fm)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	last.fm
Date:	21/11/06 (1105 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Varied listening and it's free

Disadvantages: Might not be your thing

There are times when surfing the web needs spicing up a bit and what better way than through listening to music online. There’s lots of ways to do it these days, what with radio stations like Virgin and many others available on the Net but a format I came across the other week intrigued me. Up until recently I’d be checking out bands I liked through either http://www.myspace.com and/or http://www.youtube.com but http://www.last.fm claimed to give you the ability to personalise your own music creating a radio station that plays music to suit your tastes. Last.fm is an Internet radio station that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The site was founded in 2002 by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, Michael Breidenbruecker and Thomas Willomitzer from Austria and Germany, as an internet radio station and music community site, using similar music profiles to generate dynamic playlists. Last.fm won the Europrix 2002 and was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica in 2003.

When you first visit the main portal of Last.fm you are greeted by a minimalist red and white livery. It’s a bit stark, to tell you the truth, and not that pleasing on the eye but I’m sure the designers consider it to be the trend so fair enough if they’ve done their research. There’s an invitation to sign up and create your own portfolio as well as options to sign in and listen to the station, start sharing others’ music and even an option to upload your own music if you happen to have your own band or are a budding solo artist. Registering with the site is simple and easy requiring just your e-mail address to validate the resultant e-mail, choosing a user name and password as well as deciding whether to check the box to receive a newsletter or not. And that’s basically it. The download is a reasonable 3MB and the latest version is 1.0.7 for MS Windows.

So now you’ve decided to give the site a whirl and you are interested in the principle of scrobbling as heralded on the main portal. First things first and you will have to download Last.fm from www.last.fm/tools/downloads having registered successfully earlier. Once you’ve managed that then you are faced with a dashboard style page that asks you to either select an artist you like via a search button or select a tag option that categorises music by genre e.g. rock, punk, folk etc. The site music player will load up and the radio player will then start playing either the artist you’ve chosen or music similar in taste. If you aren’t keen on the track then you can bail out by using the fast forward icon or using the “ban” option ensures that it won’t feature on your playlist again. Conversely, you can use the option “love” to ensure a track features on your favourites list. The essence of the site is the principle of “scrobbling”. A user can build up a musical profile by listening to their personal music collection via Last.fm client and chosen songs are added to a log from which personal top artist/track bar charts and musical recommendations are calculated. The user's page 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.

Last.fm follows today’s trend of social networking by allowing users to join or create their own group. The advantages of this are as other comparable sites like Bebo and MySpace in that people with similar tastes can get together, compare notes and chat about their experiences in music which is in vogue in a massive way just now. To enable either of the options above then you’ll need to click the “users” button then select “Groups” tab. You can choose from any of the active groups already set up made up of either those active or the newest as categorized on the left and right drop downs. You can find out more about the respective groups on the group’s page. Selecting “Click here to create a group” lets you go it alone and do your own thing. You’ll need to come up with a name, description and establish any joining conditions you might want to impose. You can add friends so that you can chat to them online whilst being able to see what they are listening to at the moment and other members can recommend tracks for you to listen to. The site has an archive of over 100,000 tracks and claims that 10million tracks are scrobbled every day - that’s a lot of scrobbling! So with all of this music and social interaction going on, then what’s in it for the site? Well, there are links to purchase music online so if you like a track or fancy buying an album then you can do it through Last.fm who will bag the appropriate commission. I couldn’t see much in the way of advertising so the ability to purchase music online seemed to be the only income stream unless there are future plans to derive income from a big enough user base presumably after membership has reached a certain threshold.

I haven’t covered every single feature of the site as that would take all the fun away of visiting it yourself but other aspects include links to playing the radio station tracks on i-pods and current chart listings although many of the tracks in the current chart lists were not available in the archive and only accessible by purchasing the track/album. I love listening to music whilst surfing and a radio station that gears up music to my choice and yet manages to play artists and tracks that I haven’t necessarily come across before is ideal to broaden my listening tastes. The sound quality will only be as good as your speakers but I was happy enough with the crisp clarity of the tracks I’ve listened to on my PC. The bands available vary from current bands to ones that have done their thing and split up since and the inclusion of a profile about the band playing is a fascinating one as you get to read about them including their career details and highs and lows. All of the major bands I searched for were present including Kasabian, The Jam, The Damned, Killing Joke and plenty of others with some wonderfully eclectic alternatives played when not featuring my chosen option. I’m not that hung up on the networking aspects but I’m sure if I was then I’d meet loads of interesting people with incredibly diverse musical tastes. Maybe one day but, in the meantime, for a free facility that plays such a huge swathe of great music then I have to strongly recommend the site and suggest that you give it a try.

Thanks for reading

Mara

Summary: Overview of Last.fm