Last.fm – the Blog

“We don’t have the time for psychological romance –” Larry Blackmon, Cameo

As my missus will testify, I’m not very romantic and greetings cards make me nauseous. So I wasn’t looking forward to designing a feature for Valentine’s Day.

Then I realised it might be interesting to use music data to see if anyone else felt like me or if the world was full of hopeless romantics playing Somebody To Love by Jefferson Airplane back-to-back like saps. So I went to see Omar…

Omar the Oracle

I don’t pretend to understand what Omar does.

I like to think his job involves “running things through the computer”. Actually, he works for the Data team at Last.fm. He is always very patient with me, even when I ask stupid questions like: “Do you think David Hasselhoff‘s audience was affected by the drunken cheeseburger vs floor-as-plate incident?” (The Hoff gained an extra 400 scrobbles that week).

Omar was more than happy to dig into the Valentine’s Day stats, especially when I said I wanted to compare “romance” with “sex” (he’s always running the word “sex” through the computer – it never takes long).

To get a clean set of Valentine’s data to analyse, Omar compared the listening behaviour on 14 Feb over a number of years to the behaviour on any other day of the year, thereby sifting out the tracks unique to Valentine’s Day. Then we went to work with the location and genre tags. In his own words:

Male vs Female Valentine’s Tracks

Usually, if you run a chart for a given day of the year, the same answers keep emerging; Adele, Lady Gaga, Coldplay, or Radiohead. This time Omar tried to find something a little different: how do listening behaviours change on Valentine’s Day? I’ll let him explain again…

You can see who topped those charts yourself!
If anyone needs me, I’ll be in Fresno.

When we released Tube Tags to our loyal subscribers back in October, we promised to launch more data visualisations features soon.

Since then, we received lots of positive feedback about the infographics created for the newspaper edition of our Best of 2009 feature, including a mention in Fast Company for the “Local vs Global” comparison charts. Many of you asked for personalised versions, so that’s exactly what we’ve done! They’re now available to all subscribers in the VIP zone of our Last.fm ‘Playground.’

Listening Trends allows you to create the same kind of comparisons we did for the “London & New York vs. The Word” graphs, but on a smaller scale for your friends or neighbours. Or, if you’re not into comparisons, you can always get a classic stream graph visualisation of your listening trends over time.

Music Universe shows the artists you listened to the most in 2009. The artists are grouped by tag, depicted as moons orbiting tag planets! Building this visualisation was a particularly long odyssey through circle packing algorithms, font format madness, color tweaks and disapproving cats.

Please send us feedback or join the Playground Group to discuss these features.

Our new baby, beta.last.fm, has been out of the office incubator for about a week now, and as we feed and water her, we’re keeping a careful eye on how she’s been getting on in the subscriber enclosure before we release her into the wild.

First up, MASSIVE thanks and ‘nuff respect (as the kids say here in London town) to everyone for their feedback, suggestions and ideas so far.

We’re always experimenting with loads of ways to help make the Last.fm experience more and more awesome: in-page feedback and commenting, the Last.fm Beta Group, Get Satisfaction, chatting to our mums, impassioned debate over ping pong or in the ball pool; the list goes on. One of the most fun ways, though, is getting out there on the street, face-to-face with people, chatting and finding out how we can make stuff better. So, yesterday, I strode into central London with a laptop, some screengrab software and the promise of free coffee and cake.

Grabbing a seat at the nearest café with wifi, I arranged to meet a few people in the area (long-time users who’ve been with us for years; new users still discovering what we do; friends and relatives; random people off the street; anyone with a spare twenty minutes, really) to show them beta.last.fm and watch them having a play with it. Loose, informal user testing — or, to use its technical term, ‘chatting to and watching people try out our new ideas over some free coffee and cake’ — is fascinating, great fun to do, and, combined with our other feedback-recording methods, as I believe Mr. Matthew Ogle, Esq. will discuss, reveals fantastically rich layers of information that really help us improve the Last.fm experience.

Right now, back at HQ, we’re working flat out (though, at the time of writing, it is Friday, so we’ll be having a few down the Arthur too), mashing all this feedback and observation together to help us tweak, polish and rethink our ideas and plans as we move forward to a public release of beta.last.fm as soon as possible.

Once again, thanks, and big up to everyone for the feedback so far. We’re listening to everything, and working directly with your help, so keep keep keep it coming.

PS fidothe, alexmuller, molluskii, camilondon, brooner, and clacaby – pleasure to chat to you today.