Last.fm – the Blog

Today we are releasing a sparkling new version (1.4) of our client software. In addition to a general cleaning up of functionality and bug fixes, this is the first client with audio fingerprinting built in. You can read about fingerprinting in earlier blog posts, but essentially we are going to start analyzing the way your music sounds to better identify and scrobble what you listen to.

The implications to this are vast. Not only will we be able to build you a more accurate profile but recommendations and overall stats will improve. Of course, for this to work we need to gather a significant amount of data. With that in mind, this is simply a data collection release of fingerprinting. The new client will be sending us the fingerprints but we don’t have much functionality exposed around the data yet. Expect us to roll out more user facing features in the next client release after we’ve gathered enough data to ensure excellence.

If you’d rather not have your tracks fingerprinted, this can be disabled in the Scrobbling section of the Preferences.

We hope you enjoy the new version and look forward to more client growth in the near future.

Download it here.

Last night was thunderous. By the time Shit and Shine took over the smallest stage in the world with their six drumkits, bowling was in full effect. The only downside? You just don’t get the same auditory satisfaction with a ten-pin strike when you’re up against six drummers and four synths.

It was the first I’d heard six drummers playing in unison. Interestingness. Fucking awesome interestingness!

Maybe it’s a good thing that you couldn’t hear the bowling lanes, as there were more than a few drunken lopsided blowing ball tosses—landing with a booming crack—that otherwise might have brought on stern looks from more serious bowlers. Sure, I’m guilty.

What else happened? Total hotttt = Ipso Facto, who had the entire audience entranced with their sublimely crafted post-punk pop noir, and Popnoname changed his clothes five times during his set. With only a bag of clothes and his laptop he fit on stage perfectly, and had the party diehards dancing to his catchy beats until the bowling alley shut at 2AM.

Overall, not bad for a night in central London.

The social music dream team we are building in London gained another familiar face today – say hello to Toby from Musicmobs

Musicmobs was one of the early social music sites. It was more playlist-centric than Audioscrobbler, and had a very slick app (Mobster). You can check out Musicmobs.com for Toby’s note to Musicmobs users detailing the transition to work on the Last.fm desktop software:

Musicmobs joins the Last.fm Social Music Revolution

The full XSPF playlist archive from Musicmobs is available to download on the site.

Expect some of the Musicmobs magic to permeate Last.fm in the coming months :)

After four weeks of intense voting, you voted for Lucky Soul’s ‘Lips Are Unhappy’ to be the track that we take to the top of the charts this December. (Broadcast 2000 was the worthy runner up).

You can now pre-order ‘Lips’ (which is bundled together with an exclusive, never-before-released cover of the Mud festive classic ‘Lonely This Christmas’) for a mere 40p (for non-UK readers, that’s as cheap as a download can be and still register for the charts!)

We’ve partnered with the lovely folks at Indiestore to bring you this fantastic offer, so if you want to make a stand against reality TV pop winners, Spice Girls nonsense, and all the other boring rubbish that gets in the Top Ten at this time of year, then click here now and pre-order the Last.fm-endorsed shimmying brilliance that is ‘Lips Are Unhappy’ (all profits go to charity).

We’re nearing the end of the voting stage for our Christmas Chart Attack, our bid to break the stranglehold over the Christmas charts of reality TV winners and reformed pop puppets.

For the uninitiated, we found three up-and-coming bands causing a buzz on our hype chart (thanks to your scrobbles), and decided to try and take one of them to the top of the charts this December, in direct competition to the X Factor (for non-UK readers, it’s one of Simon ‘American Idol’ Cowell’s many shows where the general public get to pretend to be a real pop star for a nano-second before they’re dragged back into obscurity).

We’ve been counting your votes, and will announce the winner this coming Monday (19th November). To mark the occasion, we wanted to put on an event with the bands. But we wanted to make it special. So in the spirit of a fairly successful band from Liverpool, we decided to stage it on the roof of our office.

At lunchtime today, everyone in the office, a camera crew from Channel 4, and a select group of journalists and music biz types, all crowded onto the last.fm rooftop to watch Lucky Soul and Broadcast 2000 blast their sweet tunes across East London (Neon Plastix, with great timing, decided to split up the day before!)

It was a beautiful sunny day, and as the music wafted across Hoxton loads of people in the surrounding offices emerged at windows and on their own rooftops to watch. It was a great moment – as one Last.fm wag exclaimed, “Best. Lunchbreak. Ever.”

You can check out our pictures from the gig at the Events page, to be followed tomorrow by video footage. And get ready for the announcement of the winner on Monday at the Christmas Chart Attack group page, after which you can buy the winning track for a mere 40p and help us battle Cowell for the top spot this Christmas.

We teamed up with Bebo today, as part of their Open Media launch, to offer amazing genre-based music video channels. If you’re on Bebo you can now watch heaps of videos from our catalogue, across 7 different genre-based channels, and embed the videos on your own Bebo page.

Check it out over at our Bebo page. There’s great new videos from Hard-Fi, Editors, Serj Tankian, and Plain White T’s, as well as lots of classics from the likes of Justice, Fatboy Slim, and The Chemical Brothers.

If you’re an artist on Last.fm and you haven’t yet added your latest cinematic masterpiece to your page, then get uploading, because now you can promote your music to millions of Bebo users as well as the Last.fm faithful. Which channel are you?

• Indie Rock videos

• Emo music videos

• Urban music videos

• Electronica music videos

• Dance music videos

• Acoustic music videos

• Heavy metal music videos

“When was rock’n’roll ever meant to be comfortable?” asked Julian Cope in reference to Japanese genre-mashers Acid Mothers Temple. He’s right, and AMT proved it last night at our second live event at The Old Blue Last, destroying ear drums, smashing through everyone’s expectations and blowing up the boundaries between dive-bomb psychedelia, heavy riffage, and coruscating improvisation. It was an experience.

The place was filled with AMT freaks, kids getting their first fix of this sound, and loyal fans who’ve been following this collective since they started back in the ‘70s (in testament to their longevity, the AMT merchandise stall was laden with endless obscure CDs and DVDs from the band’s career that you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else, rich pickings for the faithful).

AMT played an hour and half set that moved seamlessly from sombre noise to epic heaviness – helped in no small part by legendary Krautrock heroes Can vocalist Damo Suzuki. Yes really, the man who was the singer on Tago Mago and Future Days was belting away vocals right there in front of us in a tiny East London pub!

Out front guitarist and vocalist Kawabata wrenched extraordinary noise from his guitar – sometimes playing it with a magic wand – while synth wizard Higashi added hallucinatory FX. By the end everyone was beautifully wiped out!

A big thanks to Acid Mothers Temple for an unforgettable evening, and to all the people that made it out to share this amazing kick off event to their UK tour. For those who missed out on the night, never fear as they’re playing again in London at Corsica Studios. And for all of you hard core fans that can’t make it to Corsica we have exclusive videos, pictures, tracks, and a one on one interview with the singer and guitarist Kawabata from last night all here.

For those who are wondering about what’s next in store for Last.fm/Presents, we’re throwing another event this month at the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes with some awesome bands and DJ’s that will be performing all night for your rocking out and bowling pleasure. Check out the full event details here.

Although I feel bad pushing the Shaggy Bigs Up Last.fm video further down the page (sorry Muz), here is an update on recent releases in case you missed them:

Last.fm on OS X Leopard (beta)

Max has posted a build of the Last.fm software which supposedly plays nice with Leopard, see this forum thread for the download link. Feedback appreciated from Leopard users (in that thread please!) so we can ‘officially’ release a Leopard build.

Listeners update: Just Listened

The ‘listeners’ section on artist/album/track pages now includes a healthy mix of people who are currently online and have just listened to the item in question. This makes for some interesting exploration.

Privacy

If you’re worried about your ex-girlfriend stalking your profile to see when you’re online (you know who you are), then you can opt-out of realtime features from your privacy settings.

Fingerprinting

Norman has published a command-line fingerprint client which also returns some basic metadata, if we can identify the song.

The next fingerprint milestone will be releasing a build of the Last.fm software that can fingerprint songs (expected in a couple of weeks time). Soon after that we’ll have enough data to publish the proper webservice, so it will be possible to give the fingerprint service a good work-out.

Needless to say we are all extremely excited at the prospect of finally fixing up the plethora of badly spelt artist and track titles on Last.fm.

Wiki Fact Tags

Artist wikis now support a few special ‘fact tags’ which allow you to markup certain important facts in artist biographies. This makes the facts easily extractable, hopefully without spoiling the readability whilst editing a wiki.

Example: Radiohead were formed in [placeformed]Oxfordshire, UK[/placeformed] in [yearformed]1986[/yearformed]….etc

See more Artist Wiki Fact-tag examples

Admittedly we’re not doing anything especially interesting with this data yet apart from displaying it on the biography page – but the mad-scientist department at Last.fm is itching to start adding this data into the mix to improve recommendations and radio.

One more thing…

We had a flood in the office :(

Another one more thing…

Jonty & Steve have started to test their brains an extra bit each day while at the same time having some much needed looking-away-from-your-monitors time by playing relaxing games of Go. You can see the outcome of this on the live GoCam in the right sidebar here on the blog.

Shaggy is a well known, and dare I say it, respected musician. To date he has managed to amaze us and leave us awestricken with a string of bombastic musical numbers.

However just yesterday he managed to exceed himself and go that one step further that no artist has ever done before. He, the man, the myth, the mirth, has bigged up Last.fm. It is with great pleasure that I wish to share this momentous occasion with you, the users.

Behold, the video of amazingness.

Remember kids, you are tuned into Last.fm. Shaggy says so!

This one is for all the Java geeks out there…

You may or may not know that a lot of the backend data processing at Last.fm (e.g. chart generation, listening pattern analysis) is done by applications we write in Java. Like many other Java users we also use Ant to build our software. Recently we have incorporated Ivy into our build process to help us manage the dependencies between our projects and any third party libraries that we use (incidentally, Ivy has just graduated to an official Ant subproject so it is moving from strength to strength). This went smoothly until we ran into a limitation of Ivy that prevented us from using Subversion as a dependency repository as this isn’t supported out of the box. Fortunately Ivy has been architected in such a way that it is very extensible so we coded up our own Ivy Subversion Resolver and gave it the oh-so catchy name “Ivy-svn” (a name only a geek could love).

Anyway, the point of all this is that we found this really useful and decided not to keep this to ourselves but to share the fruits of our labour (and the code) under the Apache license. If this sounds like something for you, head on over to the Audioscrobbler development site at:

http://www.audioscrobbler.net/development/ivysvn/

to find out more. If you do end up using it and have feedback or issues, we’d love to hear from you.