Last.fm – the Blog

Back in July we launched Last.fm on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It was the end result of months of hard work and we were pretty happy with how it turned out. We received tons of positive feedback and although we weren’t able to launch in every country, we were able to provide an excellent streaming solution in more markets than any of the other iPhone players.

Fast forward 3 months… Apple released the iPhone 2.1 firmware which was unfortunately incompatible with the bleeding edge coding techniques cooked into our app. Fortunately, we have been feverishly working on the next generation app that also happens to be 2.1 firmware friendly. Team iPhone have once again outdone themselves to produce what quite frankly, is a work of art (check out the tagging interface if you doubt).

There’s been some awesomely high profile internet leakage of beta test footage, but below you can see the version that’s available right now from the iTunes App Store:

Here’s the feature breakdown:

• VASTLY improved user interface all around (tap to zoom album art included)
• Ability to tag songs
• Personal tag radio
• Calendar based events view
• Common artists when viewing a user profile
• Many other usability and back-end features

We’re working to release the app in as many countries as possible and this version is available now in the following: US, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain and France. We’re also working on some back-end changes that will make streaming more reliable on slower connections, so stay tuned.

This version is a great improvement from the first, but it is by no means the end of the line, so please send us feedback! We’re looking forward to making the app even better with your help.

Download it here.

The bagel was delicious. Lightly smeared with all-American cream cheese. I was so enamored with this treat that I almost missed Sam’s parting words as he wandered off to the iPhone expert lab. Sam is our iPhone developer, and this was July. We were attending the Apple Wordwide Developer Conference, just before the launch of iPhone 3G.

That was all very exciting. The iPhone stuff. But I had more important things to attend to. The Last.fm Scrobbler wasn’t working great with OS X 10.3. I made my way over to the compatibility lab, licking the breadcrumbs from my fingertips.

Sadly, the lab was less useful than I had hoped. As I turned to leave, the gangly technician mentioned that two French chaps had just been there before me with the same problem.

“They were the VLC guys”

“Oh neat,” I said, trying not to look too excited, “did you see where they went?”

He hadn’t. But I decided I had to find them and meet them and get pictures taken with them. My geek-cred really needed the boost. However there were five thousand delegates at WWDC that year, and I didn’t have time to go round them all listening for French accents. And anyway, I had a session on Core Animation in 40 minutes. As usual, in such seemingly hopeless situations, IRC came to the rescue. #videolan on irc.freenode.net.

At a conference for computery types, it was almost certain they would be logged onto their chat channel 24 hours a day. And I wasn’t wrong. After virtual introductions, we made arrangements to meet somewhere physical and were amused when it turned out we were already sitting at adjacent tables.

VLC is amazingly well known media player, probably somewhat because they have solved the, “what media player can I use to play this file?” question by providing a simple three syllable retort; “VLC”. And somewhat due to its amazing modularity and clean design which appeals to geeks. But mostly I think its popularity is because it is so clearly awesome. And there’s nothing like over 100 million downloads to confirm that kind of sentiment.

It was great to meet the VLC team and learn about the problems they face working on such a high profile open source project. The fruits of our meeting were scrobbling support in VLC 0.9.2. You can scrobble VLC via the official Last.fm Scrobbler, if you have it installed, or directly with VLC, if that’s what rocks your boat.

At Last.fm we don’t believe in closed technologies. We believe in open ones. That way, everyone benefits.

There are plenty of great groups on Last.fm. However, some of them can be a bit hard to find. We thought one way to make it easier to find groups would be to make it easier to find similar groups. What do you think?

Here are some of my personal favourites and their similar groups:

• Bossa Nova: they have a great group radio, if you are into that kind of music
• Addicted to Last.fm: the title says it all
• Converse: this special sponsored group has a really cool feature you won’t find elsewhere on the site
• The Special Interest Tag Radio Collective: some of the best tag radio stations I know of are listed there
• People with no social lives that listen to more music than is healthy who …: a wonderful example of how a long group name totally makes sense
• Last.fm Book Club: a great example that there is sometimes more to life than just music
• …

Btw, what are your favourite groups?

At Last.fm we’re fond of elephants. A few months ago Martin and I went to a gathering of elephant enthusiasts and liked what we saw. In fact, we liked it so much that we decided to host a similar event in London. Some 50-60 herders turned up to enjoy the presentations as well as the free beer and food kindly supplied by Yahoo! and Skills Matter.

If you are wondering what on earth I’m talking about, the event was focused on Hadoop – “a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data.” We use Hadoop extensively at Last.fm and, judging by the number of people who came to the event, we’re not alone.

To make sure you don’t miss the next event you can subscribe to the Hadoop User Group UK mailing list by sending an e-mail to huguk-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and then replying to the confirmation e-mail RSS feed of the HUGUK blog. You can also simulate the experience by getting a beer from your local shop and watching the videos and presentations below. Sadly you will have to talk to yourself after you’ve watched them as we won’t be there.

• Doug Cutting (Hadoop project founder, Yahoo!): Hadoop overview
• Tom White (Hadoop committer, contractor): Hadoop on Amazon S3/EC2
• Steve Loughran (Hadoop committer, HP): Deploying Hadoop with Smartfrog
• Martin, Elias and Johan (Last.fm): Hadoop @ Last fm

• Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh) – Using Nutch and Hadoop for Natural Language Processing
• Tim Sell (Last.fm) – PostgreSQL to HBase replication
• Mark Butler (HP) – Distributed Lucene
• Klaas Bosteels (Last.fm) – Dumbo: Hadoop streaming made elegant and easy

• Various participants – Hadoop Panel Discussion

A big thank you to the presenters!

My only regret is that we didn’t have time to finish all the beer, better luck next time.

Today we are pleased to announce a cool partner integration with Gamespot for their Rockband 2 launch center. Gamespot has setup Last.fm radio with the ability to play songs from the game (so you can start getting warmed up :). They will be updating their station with new songs that show up in weekly download section of Rockband 2.

This is a great example of the type of partner integration that we’ve been working to deliver. You should start to see more Last.fm players across the web (they’ll scrobble if you’re logged in). If you’re a website that’s interested in using a Last.fm radio, please email box@last.fm.

One of the nicest bits of feedback we’ve had here at Last.fm HQ in the past few weeks was a message from two users who had just started a life together. They wrote to say that it all started through common musical interests on Last.fm, which led to them becoming friends online, and, over time, to discover that they were true soulmates. Yes, honestly.

As it happens we’ve been using the idea of a musical soulmate – someone who shares your most important musical tastes, your loves, likes and dislikes – to guide the development of our new neighbours service, which you can try right now, along with the other cool demos on playground.last.fm.

Our goal for this new service is learn how to introduce you to other Last.fm users who have lots in common with you – so you can be sure to find something you’ll like if you explore their home pages or listen to their personal radio. Making this vision a reality is challenging, but we think we’ve made a promising start. We’ve also tried hard to design the service so that we can quickly incorporate new ideas into the way we find neighbours – so please let us know how you think we’re doing, and what would make your neighbours even better.

So how is the new service different? In the first place we’re now able to use live charts to create a musical profile which we match against other users. This means that your neighbours can change as soon as you start to listen to new music. We think this is specially important if your tastes change over time, or if you’re new to Last.fm (we can start finding neighbours for you after the very first scrobble). In the second place we do more than just matching profiles. We make sure that all the neighbours we suggest have scrobbled something within the last couple of weeks, and if you’re heavily into several genres then we try to find at least a few neighbours for each of them. We take into account everything you’ve told us about your music listening, loves, bans, tags, etc. We also use some special stats to measure how aspects of your musical personality compare with other users. If we have time we may break out the coolest of these onto a separate “Compare yourself with…” page. In the meantime you might enjoy Anthony Liekens nice tool to compare tag clouds.

One feature we’ve already added to the playground demo is the chance to give us some extra help if you think we could do better, by suggesting some artists that your neighbours ought to be into, or not into. Even if you’re not that interested in neighbours, here in the research team we’d really like to hear how you get on, as we can use what we learn about neighbours to help improve all our recommendation services. And if you do find a musical soulmate through Last.fm, please let us know!

[Suggested listening while reading this post: Quality Control – Jurassic 5]

Prior to moving to London to join Last.fm I worked on credit card software for a leading international bank. When it comes to dealing with people’s money there isn’t much room for mistakes and buggy code can have major consequences. For these reasons there were a number of processes and systems in place to reduce the likelihood of software errors.

Despite what some of our more critical users may think, we do actually have a number of similar systems (and some novel additions) in place at Last.fm. We use software like Cacti, Ganglia, Nagios and JMX to monitor many aspects of our running infrastructure and the results are made available in a number of ways – from coloured graphs to arcanely-formatted log files. So much information is churned out that one could easily spend all day just looking at all the output until one’s mind buckled under the data overload. For this reason we selectively take the most vital data (things like database load, web request times, uptime status of core machines) and display these on eye-catching displays in our operations room.

Status display screens.

The setup shown above is great for being able to look up and get a quick feel for the current state of our systems. Blinking red and graphs with huge spikes are rarely a good thing. In addition to these displays we also have a number of alerts (e-mail, sms, irccat) that get triggered if things go wrong while we are away from the screens (yes, it does happen). There is nothing quite like the joy of being woken up in the early hours of the morning with a barrage of text messages containing the details of each and every machine that has unexpectedly crashed.

While all of this is very useful for keeping an eye on the code while it is running, it’s also good to be able to put the code through some checks and balances before we unleash it on the wider world. One means to this end is the venerable Hudson – a continuous integration engine that constantly builds our software, checks it for style and common coding errors, then instruments and tests it and reports on any violations that maybe have been introduced since the last time it ran. We have over 30 internal projects that use Hudson and a few thousand tests which run over the code. Hudson comes with a web interface and can be configured to send email when people “break the build” (e.g. by making a change that causes a test to fail). We decided that this wasn’t nearly humiliating enough and followed this suggestion (our setup pictured below) to introduce a more public form of punishment.

The bears that haunt our developer’s nightmares.

These 3 bears sit in a prominent position and watch our developer’s every move. When things are good we have a green bear gently glowing and purring, when changes are being processed a yellow bear joins the party, and if the build gets broken the growling evil red bear makes an appearance. The developer who broke things usually goes a similar shade of red while frantically trying to fix whatever was broken while the others chortle in the background.

Amid all this hi-tech digital trickery, it is sometimes nice to be able to cast one’s mind back to the simpler analogue age and the measuring devices of the past. For example, we hooked up an analogue meter like those used in many industries for decades, fed it some different input and ended up with a literal desktop dashboard that measures average website response time.

Web response time meter.

It is strangely mesmerising to see this meter rev up and down as website demand changes over the day (or we manage to overload our data centre’s power supply and a significant portion of our web farm gets to take an unexpected break from service).

On the whole we have a great variety of options for keeping our eyes on the quality prize, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of the open source software community who crafted all the software I have mentioned. Of course the biggest challenge to ensuring quality is still the human component – getting people to actually use these tools and instilling the desire and motivation to make software as bug-free as possible. If any of you out there use similar tools that you are passionate about let us know. I’d also love to hear if anyone has any other amusing or original systems to keep quality control fun and fresh. For me, I’ve got a glowing green bear to keep company….

UPDATE: We’ve had to close comments so that this page can load (over 2000 of them!), but please continue telling us what you think in the feedback forum. See you there.

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Back in May we unveiled our project to build a new version of Last.fm. Our goal was to lay the foundation for an online music experience more compelling, accessible, and discoverable than anything that had gone before.

But modernising a service powered by the people since 2002—touching on everything from the core of Audioscrobbler engine to the look & feel—wasn’t something we could do alone.

So we turned to you—Last.fm subscribers and users—and wow, you sure came through. Here’s a look at the past eight weeks of beta testing:

• 13,234 individual pieces of beta toolbar feedback
• 7,856 posts on the beta forum
• 1,866 coffee pods consumed by Team Last.fm
• 634 Trac tickets closed
• 2 sessions of guerrilla user testing
• 1 Mr. Clock Radio

We’ve been listening hard, trying out new ideas, and making tons of changes in response to your feedback. Today we’ve taken the next step in this process, bringing the new Last.fm to everyone.

Turn up the volume and have a look around

For those of you who are veteran Last.fm users, you’ll notice we’ve taken a step back to make our feature set more coherent. Don’t worry, we haven’t taken much away*, just re-organised.

Along with putting straight our clutter, we’ve cleaned house too: the user interface has been re-aligned to be a more robust foundation for features to come, and we’ve updated the look and feel. This is an evolution of the Last.fm interface, and it won’t stop developing either—we’re inspired by iterative change and dedicated to adapting the service.

Some critical pieces to the Last.fm experience have been added, and a few old pieces dusted and polished. Here’s a tour of the new place:

Library
Browse your entire music profile, down to every last play. Add any song or artist with a click. Listen to your library from wherever you are.

Import your listening history
Sync your iPod / media player when you sign up to last.fm to instantly fill your library. Your profile updates when you sync your iPod / iPhone too!

Instant recommendations
Music recommendations just got way more powerful, and now appear in seconds instead of weeks.



Real-time chart updates
Listen to a song and the charts on your profile immediately reflect the play. The way it should be!

Evident playability
Listen to tracks or radio from a shiny new player, present on almost every page.

Better browsing
Not sure what music or videos to check out? Head over to the all-new Music and Videos pages for some popular and up-and-coming tunes.



We hope the new Last.fm makes it easier to play, discover, and share great music.

Where’s the afterparty?

We’re just getting started. There’s lots more to come, and you may spot some quirks, so head over to the feedback forums to leave us a comment. This is just the beginning of the new Last.fm platform and we’re counting on you to help us make and shape this generation of Last.fm.

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*A few missing pieces will reemerge, phoenix-like, in the coming weeks. I’m looking at you ;-)

We are pleased to announce the launch of Last.fm on the iPhone and iPod Touch! Sam Steele, our iPhone development army of one, has been cranking away at a full blown Last.fm app on Apple’s mobile platforms for months now and the results are nothing short of insanely great.

Read on for details, but this video speaks for itself.

To get started, go to the music category of the iTunes App store (in iTunes or on your iPhone/Touch). Find the Last.fm app and download it (for free).

Log in or signup to Last.fm and you’ll be presented with a fairly obvious selection of Last.fm functionality. Things with the red circle icon start streaming. You can navigate through the menus and go back with the button in the upper left.

Once you start streaming something, you’ll have access to the familiar Last.fm contextual items (love, ban, skip… tagging will be in the next version). You can also check out the artist bio, similar artists and events (particularly cool). If there are current events for the now playing artists, you can specify if you’re attending or not and go to a Google map for the event location.

There’s a lot you can do in this app, but the interface is pretty slick so hopefully it will all be pretty discoverable.

There ARE a couple caveats…

First of all we are initially rolling this out in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and Spain. We’re looking at other locales but have to deal with licensing and a host of other issues. We assure you that we’re working on it.

Secondly, there are no background applications allowed on the iPhone/Touch. There are several implications to this, but what it mostly means is any time you click a link that loads Safari, the music will stop and you’ll have to restart the app. This means event maps, and bio links. We’re looking at alternatives, but for now that’s the breaks.

To end with a bit of icing, the app knows how to read lastfm:// links. That means if you’re browsing the Last.fm website on the iPhone and click a “play in software” link, the app will start streaming for you! It’s neat, you’ll see.

This is version 1.0 and we have some cool stuff lined up for the next revisions. Love to hear any feedback.

Earlier this year, we announced the upcoming launch of our Artist Royalty Program that lets artists on Last.fm accrue royalties whenever their songs are streamed.

Well, the day has arrived, and we’re excited to announce that from July 1 onwards, artists signed up for the program are accruing royalties on Last.fm.

If you haven’t yet, upload your music to Last.fm. Otherwise head straight to the Music Manager, to sign up for the Artist Royalty Program.

This is a big day for independent artists as it marks the first time that musicians not affiliated with a label or royalty collection agency can collect revenue direct from a free streaming music platform. We’re very proud to now offer independent artists the same royalty opportunities as those presented to record labels acts.