Last.fm: (D.) Critical Analysis
last.fm the social music revolution
That is the simple motto to the bar that tops this company’s website. Last.fm is a bit difficult to explain in the age of new media: it is both a website, a separate download-able application, a plug-in for other software, and a music streaming internet service.
All-in-all this company provides a great service to people all over the world- by latest counts there are 13 different language sites that support several nationalities each.
Last.fm, as it now stands, was purchased by CBS Corporation for over $280 million this past year, and is noted for its active and fastly growing membership of atleast 15 million people. So how does a small, seemingly niche website like last.fm become so worthy and popular? (it is easily personalized and takes very little to maintain are my answers)
Founded in 2002 by a group of Austrian and German music aficionados, the site served as a internet radio station with membership that shared their playlists with one another to create dynamic recommendations. In 2003 last.fm moved to London along with Audioscrobbler, a plug-in that tracks music played through programs like iTunes or Winamp and then lists that information online. These two worked together to help match members’ music taste to artists they hadn’t “scrobbled” yet, resulting in a freely personalized broadcasted internet streaming radio station of music recommendations, or more simply put “listen to this stuff, we think you might like it.“
Last.fm has now added additional services and features that calculate your musical neighbors (people who have similar tastes), additional put your friends’ musical taste into your recommendations, artist pages listing relevant information and streaming or downloading whole tracks, and also allow you to tag certain artists to help create genres or group of related music. The site also can pull information off of portable music players, like your iPod, to continue to track your music even when you aren’t connected to the internet.
The site received initial funding through venture capitalist-istic private investment, then later straight venture capitalist investment, and now maintains functionality of its relatively small staff through internet advertising sales (which suprisingly do not nearly make up even a large portion of each page).
An interesting point to note is that all of last.fm’s services are completely free and membership doesn’t require any real information. The benefit to someone like myself is that I don’t have to give up my information, money, or much active time to get something great in return. I am sure that the music industry also extremely appreciates this service regardless if they are getting money per track being played by an artist, they are able to see how popular they music is. The chart features of last.fm allow users to see who is listen, when, and to a relative degree where (atleast nationality). For example Radiohead, who made big headlines releasing their record online for free, would only be able to track how many people initially downloaded their music but with the assistance of last.fm they are able to see how many times people listened to their album and which tracks were and are the most popular as time moves on.
So get scrobbling with the new way to listen and find music!
