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| Last.fm | |
|---|---|
| |
| URL | http://www.last.fm/ |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Statistics & Community |
| Registration | Free, or subscribe for £1.50 per month ($3 USD) |
| Available language(s) | multilingual (12) |
| Owner | CBS Interactive |
| Created by | Communal |
| Current status | Active |
Last.fm is a UK-based internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 15 million active users based in more than 200 countries.Major labels agree to free music streaming. Retrieved on 2008-01-24. On 30 May, 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m (US$280m), making Last.fm the largest European Web 2.0 purchase to date.
Using a music recommendation system known as "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 or on the user\'s computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm\'s database ("scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user\'s music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web 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 rightsholder has previously authorised it. Registration is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations.
Contents |
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."Website offers new view of music", BBC News, 2003-03-27. Retrieved on 2008-02-25. 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 customise their profiles. Last.fm won the Europrix 2002 and was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica in 2003.EUROPRIX Student Award Winners 2002. EUROPRIX. Retrieved on 2006-09-03.
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 9 August 2005, the old Audioscrobbler site at the audioscrobbler.com domain name was wholly merged into the new Last.fm site. On 5 September, 2005, audioscrobbler.net was launched as a separate development-oriented site.
On 14 July, 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).
Within the community reactions to the new visual design were mixed. Opinions were also divided between those who welcomed the introduction of more social features and those who argued that technical issues (such as an incompatibility with Internet Explorer 7 and other known bugs) should have priority. With over 10 million tracks "scrobbled" each day, the popularity of the site at peak times often causes the databases to overload, with consequent delays in updating personal charts and other data.
On 15 July, 2006, a Japanese version of the site was launched. Currently, the site is available in various other languages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, Korean and Simplified Chinese.
As of December 2006, Last.fm teamed up with EMI on Tuneglue-Audiomap.stereogum: Map Your Way To New Music
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.
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.Viacom Still Buying Last.fm for $450 Million
In May 2007 it was announced that Channel 4 Radio is 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 30th 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.BBC NEWS | Technology | Music site Last.fm bought by CBS
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).Last.fm Secures Series A Funding From Index Ventures
There are currently 60 staff members, all of whom are currently based in East London, except for Edouard Brière, who lives in Sweden.
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.
Last.fm offers paid accounts, costing £1.50, €2.50, $3 or ¥350 per month.http://www.last.fm/subscribe Some of the extra features that paid users receive are:
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.
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.
At present there is no way of differentiating between bands or artists with the same name and all data is aggregated, often causing serious anomalies when the artists concerned are from completely different genres.
Last.fm\'s music library contains hundreds of thousands of individual audio tracks and past and present albums 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.Kate Holton (Feb 7, 2007).Warner Music announces Last.fm content dealRetrieved October 22, 2007. Warner\'s music will shortly 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.
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 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.
30-second previews of any of the streamable 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, Last.fm October \'06 Update. Retrieved on 2007-01-04. 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 off the website for free. The artists are paid each time the track is played. Last.fm January \'08. Retrieved on 2008-23-01. This service is still in beta mode and free on demand listening is currently only available to users in the US, UK, and Germany.
With the August 2005 relaunch, Last.fm supports user-end tagging or labeling 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"). However, since the 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 certain tags (the most well known example of this is boosting Paris Hilton to the top of the "brutal death metal" tag). The #1 Brutal Death Metal Artist
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.
One of the most popular features 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 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.
Last.fm generates weekly "global" charts 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 main reason behind the differences is that the charts reflect the musical taste of the particular demographic of the service\'s users, not that of the general public. 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.
For the week ending October 14 2007, Radiohead broke the last.fm record for both weekly plays and weekly listeners following the release of their album, In Rainbows, which was released only as digital download on that time. Therefore, the album would mostly be listened on a digital media player on a personal computer or portable media player, especially iPod, which every plays would be counted to the chart. Track "15 Step" set records for weekly plays and listeners and the ten tracks from In Rainbows made up the weekly top 10, with the lowest charting In Rainbows song having almost three times the number of listeners of the next highest placed track ("Stronger" by Kanye West, which had itself set a record for number of listeners a few weeks previously). The Radiohead album held the top 10 spots for four months after its initial internet release, but Amy Winehouse\'s Grammy wins helped her end this remarkable run.
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 than one artist. Last.fm have cited copyright restrictions as the reason for this change [1].)
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. [2]
| Last.fm Player | |
|---|---|
 Screenshot of the Windows client. | |
| Developed by | Last.fm |
| Latest release | 1.4.2.60540 / January 16, 2008Last.fm latest version log. |
| OS | Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix |
| Genre | Media player |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | http://www.last.fm/ |
An "in-page" Flash player is now provided automatically for all listeners, it is no longer 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.Jälevik, Erik (2006-04-03). Last.fm forum: Read this to get started (old beta!). Retrieved on 2006-09-03.
In a former release of the Last.fm Player application, the user could select to use an external player. When this was done, the Last.fm Player provided the user with a local URL, through which the Last.fm music stream was proxied. Users could then open the URL in their preferred media player. They have re-included this functionality in the latest version of the player.
Since Last.fm consists of a Shoutcast mp3 stream it is possible to listen on Last.fm using the player of your choice.Play last.fm streams without the player
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.
Following applications have native support for sending song information:
Plugins are available for the following applications: [3]
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 is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. The data is available from Last.fm\'s Audioscrobbler site.
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 Blog - "Build". Retrieved on 2008-03-05.
Last.fm partnered up with the SXSW festival by creating an application embedded in the corresponding group page 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.Last.fm Blog - "SXSW Band Aid". Retrieved on 2008-03-05.
On 30 May 2007, Last.fm launched their company blog.
| CBS Corporation | |
|---|---|
| Corporate directors | David R. Andelman · Joseph A. Califano, Jr. · William S. Cohen · Philippe Dauman · Charles K. Gifford · Bruce S. Gordon · Leslie Moonves · Shari Redstone · Sumner Redstone · Ann N. Reese · Judith A. Sprieser |
| Radio stations | Broadcast radio stations owned by CBS Radio |
| Radio networks | CBS Radio Network · Free FM · Westwood One |
| Broadcast television networks | CBS · The CW (co-owned with Time Warner) |
| Television Facilities | CBS Broadcast Center · CBS Studio Center · CBS Television City |
| CBS Paramount Television CBS Studios, Inc. | Big Ticket Entertainment · CBS Paramount Network Television · Spelling Television · CBS Television Distribution |
| Television stations | Broadcast TV stations owned by CBS Television Stations |
| Cable television networks | Showtime Networks · College Sports TV · MountainWest Sports Network |
| Web properties | CBS Interactive · CBS Innertube · Last.fm |
| Publishing | Simon & Schuster |
| Miscellaneous assets | CBS Consumer Products · CBS Records · CBS Outdoor · Westinghouse Electric Corporation · CBS Operations · CBS Home Entertainment · CBS Films · CBS Games |
| Annual revenue: ▲ $14.54 billion USD (2005) · Employees: Unknown at this timeStock symbol: NYSE: CBS, NYSE: CBSA · Website: www.cbscorporation.com | |
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
