20 DECEMBER 2007 UPDATE:
Hello world! We’ve now extended our YouTube integration beta to most countries round the globe. There’s also a new ‘flag as incorrect’ feature that you can use to help fix up pages where we’ve accidentally imported the wrong videos. Thanks for all your feedback so far! -Matt
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Why let mashups have all the fun?
Today we’re testing a new feature for users on our home turf: music videos from YouTube. These videos sit alongside our own videos, and are automatically connected when you visit track pages.
If you’re in the UK, check out the pages for your favourite tracks, and let us know what you think! Depending on the response, we may consider rolling this out to other parts of the world too.
Comments
adrian
23 October, 12:10
Great feature!
Useful for finding live versions of songs, and the related videos down the side is a cool idea.
Lots of the videos aren’t great quality though, especially some of the live ones; perhaps some sort of ranking system could help fix that.
StudleyUK
23 October, 12:33
Very nice integration. It’s a bit of a shame that these videos don’t count towards your scrobbles (like the official Last.fm ones do), but I can understand why.
Cobs
23 October, 12:43
I guess it’s hard to moderate which videos get shown, some aren’t that great quality but it’s still a nice feature.
Bart (snowbe)
23 October, 12:55
Nice feature.
You could also make an AIR application for it (like Joost) to browse trough it like a TV?
happeh
23 October, 12:58
I’ve clicked on a few tracks’ pages, some of them came up with a mixture of live videos, official videos and one bizzare video with scrolling lyrics and semi-random images — but nevertheless a fun feature and definitely good for students who just don’t want to do their work.
Martin
23 October, 13:17
yeh, I really like this thing!… tis cool, cos it doesn’t only come up with the official video, but live ones too… good stuff… :-)
JoeRamboUK
23 October, 13:43
It would be good if users could pick the official video out of the list and have that as the main video and all the related stuff down the side.
SideFlower
23 October, 13:57
It would be nice if they were all tagged correctly and you could scrobble and search for them on the search page. Also an option to only search for ‘official videos’ which would rule out live recordings. A video playlist would be nice too.
What determines the order/preference of the videos on the artist pages, as if they come from YouTube only a few are showing up? Importing them from YouTube rather than waiting for artists/labels to upload them officially seems impatient and a bit cluttered and hard to find exactly what you want to watch. Also there is a also a lot of duplicate videos at the moment which needs solving.
I think it’s a very good idea in principle but it needs to be easier to use / find new videos. But it has the potential to be amazing.
If you’re interested in Last.FM Music Videos (Not Youtube),
then please join my group:-
LAST.FM MUSIC VIDEO CLUB
Steven Gravell
23 October, 14:33
The videos are currently listed in a “confidence” order depending on the track of which it was search for and retrieved from youtube. The behaviour can fluctuate from track to track, but on the whole it currently works well enough. We’ll be leading more towards making the results more normalised against tracks and “official”-ness compared to user submitted content.
Thanks for the comments, hopefully we’ll be able to bring this to the rest of the world soon enough.
Danny
23 October, 14:44
This feature rocks! Thank you!
Nectar_Card
23 October, 15:43
Nice work.
Can we have a video playlist/tag station too?
georgethe23rd
23 October, 15:59
Good feature – thanks. But what about a way to report if a video is incorrect for a song? Like neither video at http://www.last.fm/music/LCD+Soundsystem/_/All+My+Friends is correct. Also would there be a way to scroll through the videos, rather than hitting Back and Forward each time? Thanks again
The_Master_Key
23 October, 20:23
Genius, pure genius this is. Well done Last.fm this is why I subscribe to your website. Amazing idea.
mechanesthesia
24 October, 08:12
I’m in the US. But I tried changing my settings to say “UK” but I still don’t see it. Oh well…
Lil' Theater
24 October, 14:50
It’s great for bands and artists w/ videos.
But for producers without an emphasis on music videos, all its gonna link to (particularly with trance) is still image videos with the song playing in the background. Either that or some ass with a video phone’s disgusting quality recording of the song live.
Needs filtering.
kroshe
24 October, 19:13
I honestly think that it’s a bad idea.. Sorry..
If i want to watch a video i go to youtube ..
Why you guys wanna put videos here?
Helen
25 October, 01:56
Nice feature but sadly some poor quality stuff gets through, like fan made slide shows to songs or poor quality live performances.
It’d be better if the videos could be moderated in some way to weed out some of the lower quality ones.
Fabio
25 October, 10:48
Good move! Especially if you can cut the crap and just show the best videos! I’d generally say the more (videos) the better, but in this case I’d say the more (quality and relevance) the better!
I’m sure you guys know how to do it.
Rock on!
also mike
25 October, 15:39
@kroshe: “Why you wanna put videos here?”
Well, I’m guessing that is driven by the fact that lots and lots and lots of people consume music in video form. In fact, there are entire television stations which (in their original incarnations) used music videos as their entire source of programming.
I’m just stabbing in the dark here.
Colwal
25 October, 17:14
Great idea. I agree with the quality issues but i am sure this will be ironed out. Incidentally it’s nice that,for a change, the U.K gets to try something out before the rest of the world get it.
kroshe
25 October, 19:42
@also mike, thanks. I know lots of people prefer videos but I am here to listen/discover some music for my ears, not for my eyes.. well maybe I am a little outdated..
On the other hand, I was searching for a John Martyn song, yesterday : “I Don’t Want To Know”. Look what I found as the only video for this song :
http://www.last.fm/music/John+Martyn/_/Don%27t+Want+to+Know
Fred
25 October, 22:05
I don’t quite understand… where are the links to youtube? What does YouTube beta have to do with last.fm? Is the Videos on each artist page what he means? And this is currency only available to UK people? haha, awesome.
Babs
26 October, 01:41
Nice, but…
One thing I like about YouTube is the stats. You can see no. of views, ratings, etc, etc. Neither the Last.fm videos nor these new mash-ups allow us this information.
I’ve only just started really, but I’m grabbing snapshots of activity in my Reco of the Week journals.
http://www.last.fm/user/Babs_05/journal/2007/10/24/557450/
Maybe I’m a nerd, but I find all this fascinating!
Andrea
27 October, 08:51
I love the option but I wish it would filter out duplicates of the same song – being moderated somehow, I don’t want to see the same video three times on a song page because it was uploaded by three different people on YouTube. If the case the one from the record label would be enough
chris
29 October, 19:29
I think it’s a good feature, but I think it should only be integrated with an option to turn off the youtube videos. I like the last.fm videos, because of their high quality content, but having all the rest just is a bit too much.
ellietoo
29 October, 23:23
You need to be able to mark badly linked songs. One of my favourite bands, rather than showing any of the many live videos I’ve seen on youtube, has some awful girl who can’t sing and has nothing to do with them at all!
Keith
1 November, 16:35
the videos are random and often poor quality, so i would say it detracts from the authorised videos. It also states that the label or page manager has uploaded – which is altogether not true. How can i remove them? It doesn’t allow me to delete from my control panel. x
Luke Noel-Storr
1 November, 19:03
I think you should highlight that videos are from YouTube, rather than highlighting ones as being official (or do both).
Many bands don’t have any official videos, and I was staring at a results page for some time trying to work out how I was supposed to tell which were official, before I though “hmm, maybe none of them are”.
An “only show official videos” option would be nice too.
Chris Campbell
1 November, 21:27
Would be nice if you could differentiate between the last.fm videos and the youtube ones on the videos page. Just a little YouTube logo or something so you know what you’re getting when you click the link.
Nice feature though :)
UK!
3 November, 19:26
A W E S O M E !!! YouTube videos rock!
moi
4 November, 02:29
i think it’s not good
ian
6 November, 12:50
Hi
As I have posted on the last.fm forum, I have a problem with my band, Gamine’s page, and it seems to be growing. Last week there were four unrelated spam videos on our page, now there are six. Six in two weeks! Nothing to do with the band, just spam. How long before the page is filled with crap?
Much as I love this site, this has got to be one of last.fm’s worst ever ideas. It is so open to abuse that I wouldn’t be surprised to see spam ads and porn before long, as you can bet that right now, hackers are working on just such a plan. Myspace is over-run by spam and it seems strange you want to allow such a possibility here.
The solution is easy – allow the bands or labels to delete them. Please add this feature.
ian
Al
8 November, 19:50
definately needs some kind of ranking/relevance system. If I click on videos for a particular artist, YouTube can throw up someone singing an artist’s song in the shower, a random photo slide-show to the music, some Japanese anime with the music dubbed over it etc etc. Not what I want – if I click on an artist video page, I want videos from that artist, whether live or promo. And since there is no real way to filter this content other than by a human actually viewing it, we need a rating system. Higher rated (relevant, good quality) videos appearing first, filtering down to the .. erm… crap ;)
ian
9 November, 15:54
Good point, Al, but there are people willing to filter this content – the bands themselves or their labels…
They should be allowed to block Youtube content, unless they add it themselves, either from Youtube or by directly uploading to last.fm. That way, they can add official promos, concert footage etc. with no possibility of irrelevant or even possibly malicious crap from anyone else.
BillyWild
14 November, 10:50
This is a great idea but you MUST allow bands to delete videos that are added that are not related to them. I have 6 videos added to my page and only 2 are related to my band! Very frustrating.
Paul Garner
17 November, 13:58
Actually this ‘feature’ as currently implemented is really ANNOYING.
As an artist I would like to be able to manage in some way which videos from YouTube are displayed on my Last.fm page.
1) I had already uploaded all my videos to YouTube. If you’d just linked to YouTube in the first place instead of making your own video system I wouldn’t have had to upload them again. As it was I had about 6 vids on YT I would have liked to use but only bothered to re-upload 2 to Last.fm
2) For some reason the videos you pulled out of YouTube were not my most recent 6 vids. Instead you duplicated one of the ones I’d re-uploaded already, then pulled out 3 older, crappier ones.
Ok, I understand that you are not personally choosing the videos from YT, they come back from a search… so I propose a simple solution:
Let Last.fm artists add YouTube video links as ‘official’ videos.
That way, when you come to grab some extra videos from YT you can eliminate ones the artist has already added themselves, avoiding duplication.
(and it makes it much easier for artists to add videos to Last.fm in the case that they’ve already added them to YT)
big balls
19 November, 03:47
you all suck balls
Kuiper Belt
19 November, 14:45
I’m a label-owner, and I now have eight videos on my artist page, none of which are anything to do with the music. So how do I delete these unrelated videos? Why have they been posted there? Seems to me a pretty stupid idea to have videos posted to your artists page automatically without being able to vet the videos shown.
Mattrick
22 November, 12:38
Yeah I’m an artist with no music videos, but there is some other guy’s video on my page.
How do I get rid of that?
I think it’s a somewhat pointless feature anyway. I like the official last.fm videos, but don’t see the need to put YT here, it’s already everywhere else.
Fulvian
22 November, 14:44
I wish I could recommend the videos to my friends just like the tracks.
Achenar
23 November, 01:48
Needs complete artist or label control of linking/uploading the videos, just the same as with the music, otherwise it’s just flooding artist’s pages with ridiculous, inappropriate material.
t36
23 November, 13:50
Hello,
this is a nice function, but would benefit to be integrated within the “normal” players either on the web page or application, so we could favourite, or add tags, and very importantly ban! It would be brilliant if we could hear music from these videos when playing a radio.
keep up the good work.
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