Last.fm – the Blog

Earlier this year we were approached by Sony to help develop an interactive idea that would appeal to users of Last.fm. Sony wanted to match their passion for sound quality with our passion for music. There were a lot of interesting ideas and the one that captured our imagination centred around being able to create an ultimate imaginary festival line-up and compete with your friends on who can build the best. So after months of hard work organizing a staggering amount of data, we are happy to announce Sony’s Fantasy Festival.

How it works:

You have €1,000,000 to spend on a 15 artist line up for your Fantasy Festival. Pick your all time favourite artists or pick artists you think are up and coming. If your line up ranks highest in *Buzz points you could win some pretty awesome prizes (more about the prizes here). Each week *Buzz points are determined by what artists are getting the most online buzz based on data from Last.fm, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. The competition will run for six months starting 18th November and *Buzz points scores will start rolling in on the 25th of November.

You can check out my line up here.

Happy booking!

We’re thrilled to announce that the Last.fm Playground now has a brand new VIP zone. In this subscriber-only area we’ll showcase some of our fanciest ideas, visualizations, or plain weird projects as a treat to our loyal subscribers! Here’s an overview of the new stuff we’re releasing today.

Tube Tags

Which genre were you into last summer? How have your listening habits changed over time? Is there a correlation between the music you listen to and important events in your life? We’ve built a unique visualization, the Tube Tags map, to help you answer all these questions at glance, and to marvel at all the twists and turns your music taste has taken through the passage of time. Here’s some details from mine (and some of our intermediary sketches):

Each line is a tag, moving north or south depending on how much you listened to music described by this tag. Your most popular artists for each tag are also shown. Of course, the longer you’ve been scrobbling, the better it looks! I’m really proud that I’ve been scrobbling so regularly over the past years — and that I’ve left this trail of data that allows me to revisit today, through music, past moments of my life.

While only subscribers can currently generate a Tube Tags map from their listening history, the map is visible to anybody — we thought you might want to share it with your friends. If you prefer printing this as a poster, we recommend Diginate’s online poster printing.

At Last.fm, we enjoy being mad scientists, playing with data and infographics — stay tuned for more in the visualization department!

New toys

The new VIP zone also contains a few other toys: Image Chart creates a collage of your top artists’ images, History Chart summarizes your listening activity for your top artists in a neat visualization, and Artist Connections is a musical equivalent to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game; try it out to check if there’s a chain of similar artists linking Paris Hilton to Metallica. Finally, we also added a new World Chart demonstration that shows you in which countries a given artist has been listened to most often.

We’d love to hear more from you about these features – please send us feedback or join the Playground Group to discuss them with others.

Update: We have added an option to let you render the image for your entire listening history (you’ve been warned: some pdf viewers might choke on the large image size, and there might be meatballs lurking between all those lines…). Just add &full to the download url: http://playground.last.fm/demo/tagstube/map?user=flaneur&full)

UPDATE: This is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

We’ll be performing essential maintenance on our backend systems for around 9 hours on the weekend of the 19th-20th of September. The Last.fm website will be available while this is happening, but users will be logged out and the radio will be unavailable. This won’t result in any visible changes, but will help improve the performance of the site.

Most users won’t notice any problems with scrobbling, although some users may not be able to scrobble until the downtime is over. In any case, your client will save everything so scrobbles won’t be lost.

This downtime will also affect the Last.fm desktop and mobile clients as well as third-party applications using our API.

We rarely need to perform maintenance which affects our users; most of our infrastructure is designed so all maintenance can be performed with no effect on the site itself. However, one part we can’t touch without affecting the site is our global database, and this is due for a software upgrade. We’re planning to start this on Saturday morning (our quietest day), London time.

While the maintenance is happening, you can check our status page and twitter account for the latest news.

For the last six months, I have been a part of Last.fm’s data team while writing my master thesis together with Per – and lived to tell the tale.

Presently, I’m sitting in a quiet room where the heat makes more noise than do the people in it. See, music is a big thing here and the hackers on my team mostly prefer to code with their ears hugged by earphones. It wasn’t always this hot, though.

Back in January, Per and I landed in a chilly London where the people wore hats and greeted one another in charming ways. We were on a mission: write a data store that serves as back-end to an in-house visualization tool that renders graphs out of interesting numbers: scrobbles per king of pop, subscription signups broken down by country, that sort of thing.

For someone who digs distributed systems and Big Data, Last.fm is heaven. There is a sizable Hadoop cluster and many more terabytes of data than one can comfortably fathom. At the end of our tenure – and this is the best part – we were to release the code as open source. Sure enough, we had landed our dream gig.

The offices have got that typical Shoreditch media/tech post-startup vibe going: there are copies of The Economist and Wired in the foyer, a flipped-over skateboard lies next to the umbrella rack. The company occupies a whole floor which is split into two sides: the bizniz lot occupies one end (this is where the fax machine is) and the dev teams & ops (nerf guns at the ready) rule the other end. Working hours are generally between ten and seven, so coming in at eight o’clock sharp on your first day is definitely advised against. Not that anyone would.

As those who went before me have noted, Last.fm is a rather awesome place to work. There are some seriously brilliant heads here. Not only is the staff enthusiastic and contagiously dedicated, they also take a large pride in their work and that’s key to producing quality stuff. With passion it’s true.

Per and I were given an insane amount of freedom in implementing our data store. While we did get all the help we needed, both from our closest collaborators as well as anyone else around the office who we harassed with questions, all decisions regarding the project and its execution where ours to make. At the end of the day, we were ourselves fully responsible for our own fortunes and I think it is only from that kind of freedom and trust that truly brilliant things can come. And how did we fare then? Quite well, thank you. Zohmg is out there, and although it may not change the world just this year it might make the life of a data analyst or two a tad easier.

All in all it has been a killer internship experience: I got to present at HUGUK, became involved with HBase and met people who have instilled inspiration in me that will last a long time. I have realized the benefits of working alongside incredibly passionate fellows who are committed to perfect their trade. It will be hard to settle for anything less in the future.

After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins. This is the latest stage in a long journey for us founders, which began in a living room in East London in 2002, and took us to the headquarters of one of the biggest media companies in the world.

It’s been a privilege working with the incredible team here in our London office, and we’re extremely proud of what we’ve achieved together. Last.fm’s users have more than doubled in the last 12 months (we are now at an all-time high of 37.3M monthly unique visitors), and we’re confident the site will continue to go from strength to strength. Being a part of CBS, and the recently formed CBSi music group, continues to open up many opportunities for Last.fm. Recent product releases such as the new visual radio, and the Last.fm on XBox announcement, are an indication of how much more Last.fm will achieve.

A huge “Thank You!” has to be said to all of you in front of your computers. With your contribution, enthusiasm and scrobbles you have helped to make Last.fm into what it is today: the best place for music online. Big up yourself for that, as we say here in East London.

That’s all folks, we are going to miss you!

Felix, RJ and Martin

I’m happy to announce a new and improved version of Last.fm radio on the web.

We’ve been cooking this one in the Last.fm labs for a while now and thought it was time for you to have a play, discover some new music and new features, and let us know what you think.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new.

Artist slideshow

We’ve redesigned the listening page, and at its centre is an expanded metadata area that showcases a rich catalogue of images uploaded by the Last.fm community. We believe that music discovery involves all your senses; this is especially true when you’re listening to, say, french + 60s + female vocalists tag radio.

Combo stations

Wait, what? Yep, combo stations are finally here! Pick up to three artists, or up to three tags, and mix them together in a combination of your choosing. Classical + piano? Taylor Swift + Dolly Parton? 80s + hip hop? Sure thing. While not every pairing necessarily contains enough music to make a complete station, trying out the combinations is half the fun.

Station history

With all these new stations happening, we figured you could use a bit of extra help keeping track of them. We’ve expanded your “recent stations” to store a much longer list, and added the ability to remove the stations that you’re not into. Your most recently-listened ones rise to the top so it’s always easy to start the music back up.

And more

Including: an “in your library” section that lets you know exactly how often you have (or haven’t!) listened; a scrobble toggle so that you can play Britney Spears’ similar artists in comfort and privacy; plus plenty of other little touches we hope you’ll enjoy.

As with any shiny new product, there are bound to be some release day glitches. Please bear with us as we squash bugs; you can help out by reporting any problems you spot in the support forum. We’re also eager to listen to your comments and suggestions over in the feedback and ideas forum, as we’ll keep working hard on this new version of the radio over the coming weeks and months.

On behalf of the entire Last.fm team: happy listening.

Today we are making the changes to the radio that were previously announced here.

This means that from today, listeners to Last.fm Radio outside of the USA, UK and Germany will be asked to subscribe for €3.00 per month, after a 30 track free trial period. In the USA, UK and Germany, where it’s feasible to run an ad-supported radio service, there won’t be any changes. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.

Currently you need a credit card (or debit card in many countries) or a Paypal account to subscribe. Due to popular demand the subscribe page now lets you buy subscriptions for a friend, so if you don’t have a suitable credit/debit card maybe a friend will buy you a subscription.

One night at the pub we discussed whether one could replace Hadoop (a massive and comprehensive implementation of Mapreduce) with a single bash script, an awk command, sort, and a sprinkling of netcat. This turned into a weekend project dubbed bashreduce.

To be fair, Hadoop probably does a few more things than bashreduce. But we’ve managed to cover a few key concepts in our script:

• Task coordination (kind of! sort of!)
• Mapping/Partitioning
• Reducing
• Merging
• Distributed file system (sort of! if you squint just right)

More than just a toy project, bashreduce lets us address a common scenario around these parts: we have a few analysis machines lying around, and we have data from various systems that are not in Hadoop. Rather than go through the rigmarole of sending it to our Hadoop cluster and writing yet another one-off Java or Dumbo program, we instead fire off a one-liner bashreduce using tools we already know in our reducer: sort, awk, grep, join, and so on.

I think it’s a neat idea! If you think it’s a neat idea, and you look at this gnarly bash code and think of ways to improve it, to make it more useful or more elegant, you would enjoy working for us. We’re looking for a clever C++ developer to help us tackle data mining and scale problems. My favorite line in the job posting is Interested in – we do all those things save one, which you can probably guess.

We’ve collected a few of our developer’s blogs here as well – more fodder for those of you interested in what we do.

Since our announcement last Tuesday about starting to charge users €3.00 per month for listening to the radio in countries other than the USA, UK and Germany, we’ve received a lot of feedback. It’s not a decision we’ve made lightly, and I want to explain why we came to this conclusion and answer some common questions.

Last.fm Radio has always been ad supported, which means we sell ads on the site to cover the cost of running the service and paying the music licensing fees. If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes on the site you’ll know that the Last.fm community is international to the extreme – we are made up of people from practically every country in the world. Last.fm is a better place for it.

However, we simply can’t be in every country where our radio service is available selling the ads we need to support the service. The Internet is global, and geographic restrictions seem unfair, but it’s a reality we are faced with every day when managing our music licensing partnerships.

We’re listening and we’ve postponed the date on which radio will become a subscription service outside the USA, UK and Germany. In the meantime we’ll be squeezing in some additional improvements based on your requests:

• Gift subscriptions: you’ll be able to buy a subscription for a friend

• Updating developers using our Radio API: third-party apps that stream Last.fm Radio will have full access to the Radio API, so streaming will work provided the user that logs in is a subscriber. (All other APIs remain free/unchanged)

• Investigating alternative payment options. If Paypal sucks in your country, or you don’t have a credit card, don’t despair. Based on feedback so far, we are looking at supporting pay-by-SMS, and possibly some other options. Can’t promise we’ll have support for everyone’s favourite payment system from day one, but we’ll do our best to make it easy for you.

As soon as we’ve completed the upgrades noted above, we’ll move ahead with the transition. Thereafter, radio in the USA, UK and Germany will remain ad-supported, and radio in other countries where it’s not feasible to have an ad-supported service will be moving to a subscription service.

READ THE FOLLOWUP POST: Radio announcement revisited

Today we’re announcing an upcoming change to the way Last.fm Radio works in some parts of the world. In the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, nothing will change.

In all other countries, listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month. There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.

Since we streamed our first track from Last.fm back in 2002, we have focused on playing the right songs to the right people, compensating artists for playing their music, and being the best music site on the web. We appreciate the support we get from the 30 million people who use Last.fm every month—double the number of people since this time last year. We work with over 280,000 labels and artists, many of whom we pay directly, and have built up the largest catalogue of any web radio platform: over 7 million tracks are available on Last.fm Radio stations.

In order to keep providing the best radio service on the web, we need to ask our listeners from countries other than USA, UK and Germany to subscribe for €3.00 per month. In return you’ll get unlimited access to Last.fm Radio, and a promise that we’ll be hard at work improving the service for years to come.

Translations of this message are available on all non-English versions of Last.fm sites: Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, Polski, Português, Руccкий, Svenska, Türkçe, 简体中文

Please note: We’ve had to disable comments on this post to stop this page from growing too large. Please direct any further comments to our Feedback and Ideas forum.

READ THE FOLLOWUP POST: Radio announcement revisited