Last.fm – the Blog

The Free the Music announcement was great fun – lots of people are enjoying having access to free full-length tracks. There were, understandably, lots of questions, so here is an FAQ that should help clear things up.

How does this affect the radio – does it restrict radio tracks at all?

Nope. There are no new limits to our existing radio services. The 3 play restriction only applies to on-demand listening. Listening to a track 3 times using the in-page preview doesn’t prevent it from playing on your radio, and of course you can also still listen to it as a 30 seconds preview instead of a full-length one.

We haven’t taken anything away by introducing this new service – your radio stations and playlists will continue to function as before.

When will I be able to stream full-length tracks in some other / my country ?

We don’t have any fixed dates for you yet – but we are looking to expand the free on-demand service to other countries and are working on roll-out plans. Watch the blog for future announcements.

I played a track but only got a 30-second clip – why?

There are four possible reasons for this:

1. We don’t have the track in our catalogue, or we don’t have the rights to it yet – we are working to license everything so you don’t have to worry about this, but these things take time.
2. You are not in the US, UK or Germany – our current free full-length streaming deals only cover these 3 countries. (We’re working on it, see the previous question!). There are lots of full-length tracks available globally, but the major-label stuff is currently only in these three countries.
3. You already played it 3 times. We are working on ways to lift this restriction, and we are also planning to offer a subscription service.

1. You’re playing it in the Last.fm desktop software (see below).

Thousands of artists and labels sign up to Last.fm every week, so we are continually adding new content available as full-length tracks. If your favourite band hasn’t made their content available yet, check back soon – hopefully it will be in the pipeline.

Can I play these free full-length tracks in the downloadable Last.fm software?

Currently the free full-length tracks are only available on the website. The downloadable app will scrobble your music taste to build up charts (an awesome way to track your music taste and discover new music), and give you access to Last.fm radio. If you’re currently getting clips in the software, you can change your playback settings here.

We pay the artists every time you play a track on Last.fm, based on a share of advertising revenue. We think ads in desktop software suck, so we aren’t currently playing full-length tracks on the desktop. That said, we are committed to doing wonderful things for music on the desktop this year, and will unveil our plans in the coming months.

How much will the subscription service cost?
Don’t have a figure for you yet, sorry. The best answer we can give about the price right now is that we are doing our best to offer Last.fm users a competitively priced subscription service.

What about existing subscribers?
We will continue to offer our current subscription package – the “unlimited listening” subscription will be a new, additional service.

Our existing subscribers will get various options to upgrade or otherwise change their subscription to take advantage of the new services. And yes, we will add a variety of useful options for the new subscription, like full album playback, playing track charts and so on.

What about the thousands of free full-length-preview (FLP) tracks?

Artists can still set their tracks to be made available completely free – globally accessible with no three-play limit, no subscription required – just as before. Artists and labels can set FLP permissions from the Music Manager interface.

At present, these tracks look the same as others – so if you find you can play a track more than three times in full-length, the artist or label will have explicitly set those permissions.

Outro
That’s it for now. I’ll update this post throughout the week to answer any other questions that come up.

A few days ago we sent out some cryptic invitations to a press conference in New York that Felix and Martin are presiding over. We’ve had fun in the office reading the rumors and speculation, but it’s time to spill the beans:

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

We will be paying artists directly.

We already have licenses with the various royalty collection societies, but now unsigned artists can put their music on Last.fm and be paid directly for every song played. This helps to level the playing-field—now you can make music, upload it to Last.fm and earn money for each play. If you make music, you can sign up to participate for free.

We’re not printing money to pay for this—but the business model is simple enough: we are paying artists and labels a share of advertising revenue from the website.

Today we’re redesigning the music economy. There are already millions of tracks available, and we’re adding more every day. We will continue to work hard to bring this to everyone in the world.

Take it for a spin.

This picture sits on the window outside the last.fm research team’s room. I stole it after reading about its origin because it so clearly represents my favorite dystopia, and serves as a clarion call: this way to machine domination!

Usually when someone asks me what I do for a living, I get pretty excited. There is some hand waving. I might use phrases like “making machines understand music like people do!”, “predicts what you’ll like”, sometimes even “the future of”. It’s grandiose stuff! If there’s a napkin around, I might even throw in a diagram.

It doesn’t surprise me to get back a “Huh,” or maybe a “Well, that’s interesting,” What does still surprise me is the occasional recoil-in-horror: “A machine that plumbs the very depths of my being? Surely not!” Just recently at a holiday dinner, one especially huffy great uncle so-and-so said to me, “The idea that I’d follow musical recommendations from a computer…”, he took a sip of wine and added, “no computer will ever understand why I like music.”

A Socratic Rebuttal!

What’s this judgment? Seriously, guy, pass me the cranberry sauce, and then please explain what drives this sentiment? Sort of a John Henry vs. the steam-powered hammer thing? Matthew Broderick vs. WOPR thing? Will Smith vs. robots with glowy red chests? But really, what, renegade Roombas? Who’s in control of whom? Is it possible we got our roles reversed? It wouldn’t be the first time.

How are music recommenders a corruption of music culture? Similarly, how is the gramophone a corruption of live performance? How are CDs a corruption of that warm gramophone sound? How are digital sales destroying the CD cover-art culture? Does culture constantly crumble and erode, or does it march on and evolve? Were it the former, surely by now we’d be walking on all fours, bashing each other with femurs. But we’re not! Well. I’m not.

I love the idea that new trends are eternally abhorrent to the old and that old are eternally abhorrent to the new. It makes me proud to think I’m a small part of that composition. Or decomposition. Whatever.

A Quick Plug!

So yeah, attention Philistines! We actually have not one, but two new research-related positions open. Join now and we promise to offer safe harbor during the coming robot wars.

This week a few of us lucky folks get to swap the misery of winter in London for the glitz of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It’s the gadget-fest of the year, and we’re excited that one of the announcements at the show is our shiny new partnership with Logitech. They’re our first ever official hardware partner, building Last.fm scrobbling directly into their rather lovely Squeezebox . This is just the start of our master plan to allow you to scrobble music wherever you’re listening to it.

If you’re already a Squeezebox owner you can find this feature now in the SqueezeCenter v7.0 beta release, and you’ll soon be able to set up scrobbling through Logitech’s SqueezeNetwork as well.

Of course you might already be scrobbling through your Squeezebox using the existing SlimScrobbler plug-in, which has been serving its users wonderfully since 2004 (many thanks to Stewart Loving-Gibbard, James Craig and the team of SlimScrobbler contributers). The beauty of the official Logitech version is that it’s in the software from the start, so there’s no need to download and install a plug-in – so that opens up Squeezebox scrobbling to a much wider audience.

Here in Vegas we’ve got a hectic schedule of meetings (and a few parties!) lined up, and no doubt we’ll find some sexy new gadgets to drool over – better lock up my credit card! Though it would be a crime not to lose a little money on the tables, so let me know if you’ve got a good feeling for where I should place my chips at roulette …

Like many others at Last.fm, I’ve left the warm, ball-filled embrace of Last.HQ in London and headed home to my family for the holidays.

Since arriving in my arctic homeland, I’ve been wondering if there was a way to shake up the old routine of tired holiday carols, marathon dinners, moose racing, and rambling uncles; a way to bring a bit of the ol’ Last.fm magic home. (Christmas tag radio notwithstanding.) And that’s when I hit upon THE ULTIMATE PLAN. Better yet, you can reproduce this party in the comfort of your own home!

What You’ll Need

• An internet connection
• A computer that can be plugged into a large set of speakers
• A house full of relatives (including but not limited to parents, sisters, second cousins, and loud uncles) who secretly want to party

What To Do

1. Wait until dinner has ended and holiday drink consumption is in full effect
2. Go to the room with the speakers and clear away any rugs, Christmas trees, babies, lebkuchen, or anything else which might impede dancing madness
3. Load this page to queue up an hour and a half of the finest old-school rock and roll, direct from our recent party in London
4. HIT PLAY AND TURN IT UP!

It can’t fail, especially if you have relatives that grew up in the 1950s. Happy holidays everyone…

I’m sure a few people are wondering how we got from discussion to actually going ahead with it… well, here goes….

Read the whole entry

It is surprisingly hard to type when nestled in a pool of balls. You type, you sink, you get attacked from the east by an enterprising young programmer. Settled now at the bottom of the pit you clear a small gap and realise, actually, you can touch type. You haven’t just been claiming you can for the last five years. It’s really true.

Our excuse that this is a relaxing harbour for meetings may not hold water. Nobody can stay still for thirty seconds before they dive to the depths of the pool rooting around for someone to pull under. Erupting magnificently, balls flying everywhere, before everything collapses into a game of who can hit Jonty on the head the most times in thirty seconds.

23 thousand balls goes surprisingly little distance. It was in the local, last night, over a feisty pint of best that the idea emerged. “Ball pool”. An idea so splendid, so ludicrous – it quickly became the only topic of conversation. “London is a big city. Someone must have balls to sell” postulated RJ. So we started the research. We got numbers. We booked the van. There was planning. Surprisingly, I turned up the next day to find RJ bouncing around all excited. Tony was getting the balls. We were building the pool.

We had fun.

It was awesome.

More pictures can be found on flickr

It’s been decided, in future, all interviews will be held in the ballpit. But we don’t plan on stopping there. The meeting room next door is begging to be converted into an ice-rink. The kitchen is lacking for a climbing frame. The toilets are not yet complete without a waterslide.

Fancy a job?

As we revealed earlier in the year, BBC Radio channels Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1 Xtra have begun scrobbling the music they play to their own Last.fm profile pages – great for keeping track of what your favourite BBC DJs (and George Lamb) are spinning throughout the day.

Now the boffins over at BBC Radio Labs have created a couple of nifty widgets to enable all you lovely Last.fm peeps to scrobble the tracks you hear when you tune in to any of those four channels (assuming, of course, that you occasionally switch over to old skool radio, instead of listening to your personal Last.fm stations all the time – we’re sure it does happen now and then).

You can set the widgets to automatically scrobble everything the DJ spins, or you can manually add the tracks you want to include on your profile. Find out more and download the widgets over at the BBC Radio Labs website.

It was our final Last.fm party of the year last night, and we all descended on the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club with a view to causing some pre-Christmas carnage.

Things got off to a pretty mellow start, however. One-man Seattle-based folktronica wizard Black Bear took to the stage armed with just a mic and some laptop-pop backing tracks, and warmed winter-chilled hearts with his tales of love, heartbreak, and, er, bears.

After that, it all started to get weird, as East London’s own freeform art-rockers ButtonHead arrived, faces painted, balloons at the ready, and proceeded to blast the crowd with their zig-zagging, uncategorisable punk-jazz-disco. Phew.

Things got weirder still as iBook “diseuse” (“A woman who is a skilled and usually professional performer of monologues” it says here) George Pringle divided the crowd (as well as everyone here in the office) with her arch monologues drawled over propulsive Garageband beats. She baffled and charmed in equal measure, but one thing’s for sure – everyone had an opinion about her. You’ll be hearing a lot more about Ms Pringle in 2008, mark my words.

To wrap everything up, a proper turntable legend: Mr Andrew Weatherall. Oh yes. The man behind the sound of Screamadelica, genius remixer of Happy Mondays, New Order and My Bloody Valentine, and producer of great lost ‘90s classic Morning Dove White, brought the night to a riotous close with a DJ set of dirty rockabilly.

Thanks to everyone who came down, and thanks for being so supportive of our first five live events this year in London. Here’s to a few good messy nights of rocking out. Cheers :) We’ll be back at it in February with another gig with our friends at the Old Blue Last. Check back closer to for more info.

Bebo’s launched a spanking new Open Applications platform yesterday, and we’re a part of it. What does that mean? Well it means we’ve created two awesome new apps for you to use on your Bebo profiles.

Superbands

This app works just like Bebo’s Bands, but here you can add any bands you like, not only the ones already on Bebo. With SuperBands you choose to display any of your favourite artists, personalize the app with awesome skins – and, of course, you can listen to music, too, by simply picking an artist from your list and hitting play.

What I’m Listening To

With this app you can automatically display the music you’re playing right now, whether you’re listening on iTunes, Winamp or pretty much any other music player. In other words – show off your great taste in tunes!

If any of you are Bebo users then you can grab the Superbands and What I’m Listening To apps now.