Last.fm – the Blog

Right before the holidays we put up a small events demo on playground to play with the idea that it might be useful to see relevant events on a navigable map.

Maps expose a whole world of ways to interact with our data. Maybe you want to see all the good festivals in Europe this summer, or you want to find something within stumbling distance of your front door. Maybe you live in Cambridge and don’t care about gigs in London, or maybe you do. How about seeing where your favourite artist is headed this year?

Coming up with imaginary features is fun! I could do this all day. But what I’m really curious about is whether you guys think there’s a place for maps on the site, and what you’d want it to do for you. Have a play and most certainly have a feedback.

A week or so ago, on Sunday 14th December, we held our first open Hack Day, giving developers a chance to show off what they could build in a day with nothing but their wits and the Last.fm API.

At around 10:30, the hungry and cold developers started pouring into Corbet Place, behind Brick Lane in the heart of East London. With free food and drink behind the bar, plenty of comfy sofas to drape themselves over, and a Surface table with which to amuse themselves, the hackers dug in. (Sorry you guys had to wait in the cold for longer than we’d hoped, that sucked.)

By 6:30, and in spite of wifi woes throughout the day, we had 30 quick fire demos lined up to wow the assembled crowd of geeks. As anyone who’s run an event like this will attest, getting 30 odd laptops hooked up to 2 projector adaptors on rotation with a 2 minute turnaround is no mean feat, but no one was trampled underfoot and only one person outright gave up (apologies Steve!).

Amongst our favourite hacks were Bret Ehlert’s Nostalgia.fm, an app that creates playlists based on your historical charts so you can relive your headier musical days; Your Next Favourite Band by Utku Can and Phil Nash, which finds the band everyone’s listening to but you; and Neil Crosby’s Last Genius, a bookmarklet that builds a playlist using any track on Last.fm as the starting point.

We were extremely impressed with everyone’s work but after careful deliberation, we had to select three winners for the awesome prizes provided by Codeplex:

Rob Mckinnon walked away with a shiny XBox 360 for his work building Gig notifications with Growl. In his own words:
“Need help remembering to get gig tickets? This hack gives you local event notifications via Last.fm for the band you’re now playing. Implemented as Ruby script that uses last.fm api and growl notifications. Could be wrapped up as a Mac dashboard widget with a bit of work.”

Cameron Ross also snagged an XBox for the awesome Universal Scrobbler:
“This suite of tools allow you to scrobble songs from previously unscrobblable sources. There is a FireFox extension to allow scrobbling of songs listened on MySpace, a tool to browse MusicBrainz for albums and tracks to scrobble (for example for if you listen to an album in the car or CD player), a tool to scrobble songs retrospectively that you listened to on BBC Radio, and a tool to scrobble a custom song.”

David Padbury and Jamie Hollingworth stormed to win the grand prize of £1000 with Staff Wars.fm:
“StaffWars works by playing a user’s personal last.fm station communally to the office. When someone becomes offended by their colleague’s poor taste in music they initiate a challenge to take control of the office stereo from the current user. At this point StaffWars analyses the profiles of the competing users and looks for similar tastes in music. It will generate a small music quiz based on these similar tastes in music and ask it too both users. If the challenging user wins they will take control of the stereo otherwise the existing station will carry on playing.”

The day was rounded off with an excellent set from Hexstatic while the last free drinks were squeezed out of the bar.

Thanks again to those who came and made this event a success. I can’t wait for the next one!

We’ll try to keep this list updated with all the other hacks as info comes in, let us know if we’re missing you.

• Stitch: Léon Brocard
• Spotify Scrobbler: George Brocklehurst
• Where should I live? and the perceptron: Mary Rose Cook
• Distance Select: Brian Degger with help from Nigel Crawley
• Playby: Alf Eaton
• Huffduffer: Jeremy Keith
• Songcolours: Matthew Ogle
• Lastbot: Gareth Rushgrove
• With It: Mark Stickley
• Stalker: Dave Sutherland and Lars Bortfeldt
• Flighty: Nicky Thompson
• Gigs Feed Builder: Oli Thuong

More photos from the day, courtesy Russ and Dimi.

We’ve been going gadget crazy for last couple of months, as we work towards bringing you the Last.fm experience not just on your desktop but wherever you are able to listen to music.

We’re especially excited about partnering with Sonos to bring streaming and scrobbling to their Multi-Room Music Systems. Sonos devices are great for streaming your digital music in different rooms throughout your house, and last month we integrated Last.fm streaming radio (in the US, UK and Germany) and scrobbling (everywhere) into the service. There’s also now a slick Sonos iPhone app allowing you to control your music straight from your phone – and you know how much we love iPhone apps.

In other gadget news: we’re part of the new 3 INQ1 social phone you can now get similar artist recommendations on T-Mobile phones and just this week we launched a scrobbling app for Vodafone mobiles. And last but not least – check us out on the Gadget Show on Channel Five in the UK!.

While other annual retrospectives are based on editors’ picks or sales data, the Last.fm Best of 2008 list is based entirely on what the Last.fm community has been listening to this year and shows which artist, albums and tracks defined the musical landscape in 2008.

We compiled the list by looking at the data in a number of different ways to get a full picture of what you all listened to this year. First we looked at absolute numbers. It won’t surprise any followers of the Last.fm weekly charts to know that Coldplay, Radiohead and The Beatles topped the list. While Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends” certainly made an impact this year, many of the other artists had not released any new material, and we wanted to know what artists really made 2008 different. So, we decided to slice the data to show us which new artists really broke through this year. We chose to define “new” artists as artists who released their debut full-length album in 2008 in the UK, and we ranked them by total number of listeners. Check out who made the top ten here.

Next we looked at the top albums by scrobbles in 2008. When looking at all scrobbles in 2008 by album again we saw the weekly chart champions dominated the list. We then looked just at albums physically released in 2008 in the UK and ranked them by listeners, and came up with a list that shows what albums are this year’s classics. See if you can name all top ten and then score yourself here.

The top tracks of 2008 list (as you can probably guess by now) is made up of tracks released in 2008 and ranked by listeners. Who dominated the list: earnest rockers or that summer hit you couldn’t escape? Check it out here.

Finally, we put it all together in a radio for your listening enjoyment. To mix it up a bit and keep you guessing, we expanded the radio to include the top 30 artists, albums and tracks of 2008. If you’re feeling sleuthy, you can track down the source of the radio to see who didn’t quite make it to the top.

Enjoy!

Update: If you’re logged in on one of our international sites, please change your language to English to see http://www.last.fm/bestof/2008

Back in June when we announced our new API, we were bowled over with the positive response. Hundreds of developers have been engaged in discussions over in our Web Services Group, building API bindings for Python, PHP, Actionscript, Java and other languages along the way.

Some of my favourite apps built on the Last.fm platform include Andrew Godwin’s Lastgraph, Chris Mear and James Darling’s Vinyl Scrobbler and Jorge Diaz’s One Hit Wonders. That’s just a small sample of the apps available at our gallery.

We thought it was about time to bring some of the dev community together in East London for a hack day. So here it is: The first Last.fm Hack Day, on Sunday 14th December. There’s only 150 places available and it’s first come first served. We kick off at 10AM and we have a great live act playing last thing in the evening to wash down the code. Last.fm developers will be available on the day to answer API questions and build custom data APIs on the fly should they be needed. We will be at your service throughout.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention – top prize on the day is £1000 (yes, that’s plummeting sterling, not stagnant dollar), and the runners-up prize is pretty juicy too. I hope to see you all there. If you spot a yellow square with a line running down it, say hi.

Just a quick note for those of you with an iPhone. Our friends at Simplify Media have just released a new version of their iPhone app that includes Scrobbling and more in-depth Last.fm support. You can read about the release on their blog.

Simplify provides a very cool way to stream music from your home collection to a variety of clients including the iPhone. It’s the perfect complement to the official Last.fm iPhone app and quite popular at the Last.fm HQ :) Great work guys!

With the Artist Royalty Program we wanted to solve a crucial problem. Since we started in 2002 we had licensed music from various ‘content owners’ (major and indie labels as well as digital music distribution companies), and we also paid money to collections societies all over the world. But there were certain artists and labels losing out: those who do not have access to all the above, or chose not to be part of this traditional music industry network.

The process to solve this started with two goals. First, we wanted to continue to be an effective promotional platform for all artists, a place where we could connect music makers with new fans. (Our recommendations are key to achieving this: an artist on Last.fm doesn’t have to keep reaching out to people, as our system will automatically find new music for everyone based on their existing music taste.) Secondly, we wanted to build a fair system that shared Last.fm’s revenue with those artists. In this way, as Last.fm grows, the commercial success that comes with that will be shared with all music makers, of whatever stripe.

After months of research, discussion and technical development, we launched our Artist Royalty Program at the beginning of July. From then on, artists and labels that opted into the program started accruing royalties (if their music was being played on the site, of course). Last Friday we finished the final part of this work, and have published royalty reports to all artists, and will now automatically do so every three months. And for the first time we could actually see ourselves how our royalties were being distributed between all artists and labels.

First of all, I saw something that was not surprising: there are many labels that will collect a small amount of royalties and some who collect a lot. The Long Tail never fails. Then I was looking through the labels that were the top earners and I made some interesting discoveries: there were plenty of labels in there that I had never heard of. I was surprised but equally pleased that some (what I would call niche) content owners used Last.fm to find their audience through our recommendation system, and were able to do this successfully. We have been saying for years that Last.fm can work very well for less well-known artists – since our recommendation system will find fans even for the most obscure artist – and now we have some very hard proof for that.

There are now 85,000 artists and labels collecting royalties from us directly and this number is rising steadily. And of course I want to mention: if you make music too you can join right now.

If you regularly check your recommendations page like I do, you surely know that there are tons of artists waiting there to be discovered. In an attempt to make it a bit easier to discover something that is relevant to you, we’ve been playing around with steerable recommendations. The demo we’ve just deployed on Playground allows you to enter a tag, or a combination of tags, and filters the list of recommended artists accordingly – in real time. It also suggests tags that could be useful to narrow down your search directly to what you would like to listen to. At first glance this might seem similar to the multi tag search demo, however the difference is that steerable recommendations are entirely personalised.

(By the way, in case you are wondering where the term “steerable recommendations” came from: we first heard it from Paul Lamere).

Please let us know what you think!

At Last.HQ we like to make a fuss over big new features and applications. But not every improvement to Last.fm is on the scale of an iPhone app or a site relaunch — the webteam also devotes time every week to fixing bugs, improving existing features, and generally sweating the small stuff.

We’ll occasionally use this space to point out some of the smaller touches that you might otherwise have missed. Here are a few things recently released into the wild…

Recent tracks settings

Right above your profile page’s recently played tracks is a new “Settings” option. Want twenty tracks instead of ten? Want to toggle images? Set your timezone to Abidjan? You’ve got it.

Also new is the ability to show what scrobbler and media player you’re listening with. We’ve just added support for some older clients as well.

Real-time listeners

When we relaunched the site this summer, one of the biggest new features was real-time user charts. Since then we’ve been working on scalable ways of bringing more real-time features to the site.

We’re currently testing one approach with our friends over at Motorola, who were interested in showcasing what people in various Motorokr groups around the world were scrobbling.

Now you can visit the group members page for the answer – just leave it open for a bit and watch! Once we’ve done more testing we hope to roll this functionality out in more places (all groups, friends lists, etc).

Lyrics

According to some on Last.fm, it’s all about the lyrics. We tend to agree! Historically though, putting lyrics online has been fraught with difficulty.

Through a partnership with LyricFind we hope to change this, in a way that fairly compensates songwriters much in the same way as artists.

As a start, we’ve put lyrics on more than 800,000 track pages and introduced lyric searching — in the U.S. and Canada only.

The internet knows no borders, so we’re working overtime to bring free and legal lyrics to the rest of the world.

I recently finished a 3 month internship for Last.fm in the data junkie department. Officially I was a Java intern. That means turning coffee into code. In between thoughts of “why am in a country where it’s cold even during summer?!”, I spent time thinking “how the hell did I end up here doing stuff I like?”

I’ve been instructed to write something about it. It all started on a dark and stormy night in 1981… I’ll just skip to the end. On my first day I was given a computer and told to install whatever I wanted on it. Ubuntu away!! I was very happy.

After that moment of glee however, it wasn’t all beer and ball pits. I also had to learn stuff.

Luckily I was given interesting, challenging problems and the trust to work on them with my own brain. It’s perfect for someone excited about all things open source as Last.fm uses open source tools everywhere. That helps give a warm fuzzy feeling throughout the day, even more so when I was able to make some contributions back. I submitted a couple of patches to HBase, the open source Bigtable-like implementation.

There was much digesting to be done. Researching and playing with things like Map/Reduce, Hadoop and HBase was a great way to learn about the future of scalability. It’s safe to say I learned far more than I would have crammed into lectures.

Of course, Last.fm is more than just a great learning environment. There’s also being a part of producing something that people really love. People care a lot about what they do at Last.fm and it’s infectious… beware.

I’d like to note that there are also certain things that have conspired against me during my internship. Good places in the area to go for lunch made me spend way too much money, a pretty decent coffee machine forced me to make many typos, and getting distracted discovering new music on the Last.fm website caused me to forget what I was thinking more than once.

All in all, the whole things was a positive experience that ended in a hug.