Last.fm
Encyclopedia : L : LA : LAS : Last.fm
| |
| Website name | Last.fm |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Statistics & Community |
| Registration | Free |
| 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, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, 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.
- 1 Features
- 1.1 Last.fm radio
- 1.1.1 Last.fm application
- 1.1.2 Other players
- 1.1.2.1 Last.fm Player
- 1.1.2.2 LastFMProxy
- 1.1.2.3 Online Last.fm Player
- 1.1.2.4 Amarok
- 1.1.2.5 MyLastFM
- 1.1.2.6 Last Exit
- 1.2 Audioscrobbler plugin
- 1.3 Charts
- 1.4 Recommendations
- 1.5 Tags
- 1.6 Paid accounts
- 1.7 Other
- 2 History
- 3 See also
- 4 External links
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 Player. Songs played are added to a log from which personal top artist/track bar charts and musical recommendations are calculated. 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. As with many music sites, 30-second previews of tracks are available on demand, but the intent is that the music will be played as users listen to appropriate stations.
Last.fm radio
The most popular feature on Last.fm is the 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.The radio stream uses an MP3 stream encoded at 128 kbit/s 44.1 kHz, which may be played using the Last.fm player, but other community-supported players are available as well as a proxy which allows using a media player of choice. Last.fm radio is only usable on a broadband connection.
Last.fm application
The Last.fm software program allows a user to play Last.fm radio streams. The software also can integrate with various standalone media players to allow submission of tracks played in those programs. The Last.fm application allows minor editing of the user's profile including removing artists and songs from the loved, banned, or previously played track lists. It supports integrated tagging without the need for lauching an external web browser. The new software allows the creation of custom radio stations based on multiple artists rather than a single artist.
This program effectly replaces the Last.fm Player and the standalone track submission plugins.
The software is currently available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
Other players
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. However, many users still would have preferred to use their own players, since many features (for example, graphic equalizers, visualizations, custom plugins and skins, etc.) are not and may never be implemented into the official Last.fm player.Last.fm Player
The Last.fm Player is an application program from Last.fm used for playing custom Last.fm radio streams. It is now deprecated in favor of the "Last.fm" software application. Last.fm music is most commonly played using a custom player that must be downloaded and installed. 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 won't be played again. Both features affect the user's profile. The skip button does not. Other controls include volume, stop, and options.
The player is made for Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X operating systems.
In the latest release of the Last.fm Player application, the user can select to use an external player. When this is done, the Last.fm Player provides the user with a local URL, through which the Last.fm music stream is proxied. Users can then open the URL in their preferred media player.
LastFMProxy
[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
[Online Last.fm Player] is an open source PHP application made for listening to lastfm radio streams on a webpage. It allows users who can't run or install any applications on their pc to listen to radio streams. A hosted version can be found at: [http://www.gizone.co.uk/lastfm]Amarok
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
[MyLastFM] is 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).Last Exit
[Last Exit] is an open source GTK+-based client similar to the official player.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, 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.List of supported media players
Following applications have native support for sending song information:
Plugins are available for the following applications: [link]- AmigaAMP
- Audacious
- Banshee
- Beep Media Player
- foobar2000
- gmusicbrowser (unofficial plugin)
- iTunes
- J. River Media Center
- MPD (unofficial, [mpdscribble])
- Muine (unofficial plugin)
- musikCube (unofficial beta plugin)
- Noatun
- Quintessential Player/QCD
- Quod Libet
- SlimServer
- Winamp
- Windows Media Player
- XMMS
- XMPlay
- Yahoo Music Engine
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.
There is also a weekly global chart of top artists and top tracks played across all of Last.fm.
All other charts besides personal user profiles 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 in part 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.
The Last.fm global 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.
Other limitations of the Last.fm charts are 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.
See: [Last.fm Charts]
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.Tags
With the August 2005 relaunch, Last.fm supports end-user tagging of artists, albums, and tracks to create a sitewide 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 ("singers Sarah would like").Paid accounts
Last.fm offers paid accounts, costing $3, €3, £1.50 or ¥350 per month. Some of the extra features that paid users receive are:- No advertisements
- More radio options
- A custom image generator
- The ability to view recent visitors
- A listing of what one's last.fm friends are listening to
- Beta testing at beta.last.fm
Other
Other features include a profile editor (so users can remove tracks that have been submitted with incorrect metadata or add artists/tracks to tagsets en-masse), navigation to linked profiles (such as friends and musical neighbours) and a list of individual users' favourite albums.History
Audioscrobbler began as a computer science project by Richard "RJ" Jones while at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. RJ developed the first plugins, 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.
The Audioscrobbler and Last.fm teams began to work closely together, both teams moving into the same offices in Whitechapel part of 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 unveiled. This update included a new software application for playing Last.fm radio streams and 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 all relevant information for their profile such as real-time friend status, recent journal updates, recommended songs, and tracking of forum posts; expanded options for purchasing music from online retailers; and a new visual design for the web site. Reaction to the new visual design has been mixed.
See also
- Pandora, a similar service.
- LAUNCHcast, a similar, web-based service by Yahoo!.
External links
- [Last.fm main page]
- [Audioscrobbler development site] with the protocol specifications
Press
- [Tiny webcaster Last.fm causes major online splash], Rockbites, 22 July 2003
- [Last.fm: Music to Listeners' Ears], Wired, July 7, 2003
- [Website offers new view of music], on Audioscrobbler, BBC News online, 27 March 2003
- [The Musical Myware], Audio presentation by CEO Felix Miller, IT Conversations, March 7, 2006
Awards
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