Last.fm – the Blog

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

Sometimes the endless rows of music in my media player leave me at a loss. I have a music collection that I’ve spent years lovingly crafting; all my favourite bands. Yet as I spin my mouse wheel its full length, nothing springs out. I scroll up, scouring the rows for something fresh. I scroll down, searching for some long forgotten treasure. After a few minutes I select “shuffle” and go make a cup of tea.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. Wouldn’t it be great if you could tune into your local music like you do with Last.fm radio?

That last sentence sounded very much like a product announcement did it not? Well, it was!

Pick a tag, maybe another related tag, and click play. Last.fm Boffin. Strictly a tech demo. Let us know how you like it, and we’ll roll it into the next major release of our desktop software :)

Forum announcement and download links

Flickr group
Wordle gallery

In August last year we organized the first Hadoop User Group in the UK. We liked it so much we’re doing another one on the 14th of April.

Quite a few of you probably haven’t heard about Hadoop, in short it’s an awesome piece of software that is used to process large datasets on multiple machines. If that’s your kind of thing, read more about it here.

So far the event schedule looks like this:
10.00 – 10.15: Arriving and chatting

10.15 – 11.15: Practical MapReduce (Tom White, Cloudera)

11.15 – 12.15: Introducing Apache Mahout (Isabel Drost, ASF)

12.15 – 13.15: Lunch (three kinds of pizza, sponsored by Sun)

13.15 – 14.15: Terrier (Iadh Ounis and Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow)

14.15 – 15.15: Having Fun with PageRank and MapReduce (Paolo Castagna, HP)

15.15 – 16.15: Apache HBase (Michael Stack, Powerset)

16.15 – 17.00: General chat, perhaps lightning talks (powered by Sun beer)

17.00 – 00.00: Discussions continues at a nearby pub

The meetup is held at Sun’s office near Monument station in London. It’s free, but we ask that you register if you want to come. For more up to date news keep an eye on the blog.

A big thanks to Sun for sponsoring the event with a venue, food and beer!

On Friday night a technology blog called Techcrunch posted a vicious and completely false rumour about us: that Last.fm handed data to the RIAA so they could track who’s been listening to the “leaked” U2 album.

I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.

According to Ars Technica, even the RIAA don’t know where the rumour came from. The Ars Technica article is worth a read by the way, as it explains how the album was leaked in the first place by U2’s record label.

All the data and technical side of Last.fm is hosted in London and run by the team here. We keep a close eye on what data mining jobs we run, not because we’re paranoid the RIAA is trying to infiltrate us, but because time on our Hadoop Cluster (where the data lives) is so precious and we have lots of important jobs that run every day. It’s simply impossible for anyone to run a job without the team here noticing.

When you signup to Last.fm and scrobble what you listen to, you are trusting us with your listening data. We take this very seriously. The old-timers on Last.fm who’ve been with us since the early days can attest to this – we’ve always been very open and transparent about how your data is used. This hasn’t changed. We never share personally identifiable data such as email and IP addresses. The only type of data we make available to labels and artists, other than what you see on the site, is aggregate data of listeners and number of plays.

Artists and labels can login to our MusicManager site to upload new content and update their catalogue. The MusicManager is also where artists and labels can see statistics on how popular their content is with Last.fm users.

If you were U2’s record label and logged in to the MusicManager today, you would see this:





…and you could pat yourself on the back for a successful album launch. All the controversy and press coverage surrounding the leaked release caused an obvious spike in the number of people listening to U2 recently.

So do us a favour – if you see people spreading the rumour, refer them to this blog post and mention you heard from a friend that “Techcrunch are full of shit.”

Ever since I joined Last.fm back in 2005, my long-suffering coworkers have had to put up with endless grumbles about the state of the metadata on our music catalogue pages and how we desperately needed tools for putting things right. Well, as of today they can all breathe a collective sigh of relief: Last.fm now automatically corrects common misspellings of artist and track names for you.

As you might be aware, the pages for artists and tracks on Last.fm are automatically created from peoples’ scrobbles. Until recently, the system had no way of identifying variations in spellings of artists and tracks, which led to many duplicate pages for the same artist or track. With millions of scrobbles coming in every day, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you will soon have a big metadata mess on your hands.

If you’ve been following the Last.fm Blog, you’ll have seen our articles on audio fingerprinting:

• Audio fingerprinting for clean metadata
• Fingerprinting update
• Client 1.4 release: fingerprinting begins

Our esteemed music scientists have crunched the fingerprint data you’ve sent us, and have generated a huge list of auto-corrections for both artists and tracks. As of today, these mappings enable us to automatically redirect you from a badly spelt version of an artist or track to the correct one. Try it out for yourself at Trentmoller’s page Note: this links to an incorrect spelling, and will redirect you:

Once you’ve been redirected to the corrected spelling, you will still have a choice to go back to view the original page, in case we made a mistake. If you think we wrongly corrected a spelling, you can let us know by clicking “Flag this”:

Merging data in your profile

If you have scrobbled tracks by both Trentemoller and Trentemøller in the past, these will now be combined and the playcounts accumulated in the charts on your profile. (If you don’t like this behaviour and would prefer to keep your original spellings as-is, there’s a new setting for you.)

Merging data for artist pages

We are still not merging data for spelling corrections on artist and other catalogue pages. Spelling variations there will still have their individual playcounts and charts for now. We’ll be working on this in the next phase of our metadata-cleanup operation, after we’ve listened to your feedback about the current changes.

How to report mistakes

As clever as these auto-corrections are, it’s inevitable that some mistakes will slip through, especially in these early stages. On each artist and track page, you will see a link down at the bottom of the right hand sidebar, which allows you to suggest new corrections or flag existing ones. The more votes we get through this system, the more accurate the catalogue will grow over time. So please be patient and it shouldn’t be long until you’ll never see that “fix your tags” image in your charts again!

Please note we won’t auto-correct spelling in your comments, but we will delete off-topic ones :)

For the past 6 months we’ve been on a mission to let you experience Last.fm where you want, when you want. We realize that not everyone has a web browser plugged into their home stereo and very few of us want to take our laptops on the morning jog. We’ve worked with a great group of partners to bring Last.fm to the living room and the mobile phone.

Today we’d like to add another platform to the list: Android. Android is Google’s open source mobile operating system and it’s pushing the boundaries of what you can and should expect from your mobile phone.

Our new Android app is a fully featured Last.fm radio application that leverages the open nature of the Android OS. You’ll be able to stream your favorite Last.fm stations, view your friends’ profiles and watch out for up coming events.

One Android only feature we’re pretty excited about is… background streaming! This means you can keep listening while you browse the web, buy songs from Amazon or check out maps for an event that looks interesting. We’ve been playing with the prototypes for a while and can honestly say this is a killer feature.

Keeping with the open spirit of Android, we’re also working to make sure it’s easy to scrobble music you play in other applications. We’ve been talking to Google about scrobbling the built-in media player and will be exposing our service in a way that allows other applications to scrobble songs. This is a work in progress but something that’s unique to Android that we intend to fully embrace.

Finally, I think it’s worth mentioning the amazing development path this project has taken. First, the timeframe for rolling this out was super tight. We started work about a month ago and feel the end product shines. Kudos to the awesome client team for the rapid turnaround. Part of the secret to success was using our open source development community. We had been contacted by a couple of open source developers who wanted to bring Last.fm to Android. Instead of having multiple projects, we all decided to work together to create one official Last.fm application. So, special thanks to Lukasz Wisniewski and Casey Link for contributing their projects and time and helping make a really exciting application.

Stay tuned for more updates as we plan to launch some exciting new mobile features soon.

Download it now from the Android Market on your mobile.