Last.fm – the Blog

It seems we owe everyone an explanation on a subject that has come into the public eye over the last few days. Tomorrow is the so-called “Day of Silence,” during which thousands of US webradio broadcasters will get together to turn their radio streams off for a day to protest the newly-introduced higher rates that SoundExchange intends to charge them.

Last.fm decided long ago that we wouldn’t be participating in this; I’d like to explain here why this is the case. To warm up, I suggest you read this Techcrunch post (and today’s one), which sums up the argument for why we should turn off, and, in the comments, the argument for why we should stay online.

Where We’re At

Firstly, Last.fm is a social music platform and not only a radio station. Unlike many of our fellow webcasters, we have a vibrant social network, a massive music fanbase, and people spend a lot of time using the site without ever switching on the radio.

Secondly, as we’re based in London, this kind of legislation is not new to us. In fact, we’ve had to live with its existence since our inception in 2002.

A Quick Licensing Primer

In the US, copyright holders (i.e. people who make a recording, usually the labels) do not get royalties when a song is played on terrestrial (traditional) radio. When webradio became more popular in the early 2000s, new legislation was introduced that charged operators online radio royalties that went to the copyright holders; new media, new rules. A panel called CARP set the royalty rates at ~£0.00035 ($0.0007) per track played, and that was that. After heavy protests in the US, they introduced a “small webcasters” rate which charged a percentage of revenue instead. Last.fm was paying this rate until recently, having been a small webcaster for quite a while.

Recently, a new panel called CRB (which replaced CARP) got together and re-evaluated these rates. In a nutshell, they’ve more than doubled, going up to ~£0.0009 ($0.0018) per track by 2010. This is what everybody is protesting about.

Now Last.fm, being a UK company governed by UK law (which we still are after the acquisition), has been subject to a whole host of additional rules since the beginning. Every webcaster has to pay royalties in all the countries they stream to. They also have to make agreements with all the relevant local royalty collection societies. Since 2002, we’ve been in the process of doing this. In fact, we applied for a UK radio license before the site went even public (with about 3 listeners we all knew personally!). This was smack dab in the worst time to be doing online music, right after the big Napster meltdown.

Pretty soon we also learnt about the copyright charges, which in the UK go to a society called PPL (they’re the UK equivalent of SoundExchange). Since the days of CARP, the PPL has proposed charges which are even higher than the rates being proposed in the US by CRB now.

This continues to be a massive challenge for us, but it’s one we’ve been struggling with for years. We’ve racked our heads to come up with a business model that can survive and even grow under these difficult circumstances, and I believe we’re making progress.

The mood in the US, however, has turned rather pessimistic with a number of stations publicly foreshadowing their own demise. Frankly, we’ve been slightly baffled by the opinions being aired. Rates have been a commercial reality for years.

Play It Louder

So why do we think the “day of silence” is not a good idea?

We do not want to punish our listeners for our problems, period.

If a commercial challenge comes up, we have to deal with it. We have always done that, as many people who have been using Last.fm for a while can attest to. And we’ve had our fair share of challenges. (Like the server growth problems we’ve been battling recently. Mischa was overheard grumbling that “we’ve probably put in two days of silence!” over the last couple weeks; a heartfelt thanks our users for their patience.)

Since Last.fm started we’ve engaged in negotiations with the music industry, leading to our recently reaching an agreement with several major record labels for the use of music on our service. As a legal and responsible provider of music, we’re continuing discussions with record labels and music publishers. At the same time, we’re negotiating with royalty collection societies to make sure we can get rates that make sense to us.

The only solution to this dilemma is commercial; make a commercial argument and see it through. What benefit does music have if no one is playing it anymore? There are various opinions about the promotional benefits of playing music on the radio, but having your music heard by more people instead of less can’t be wrong, no?

What I am saying is: it’s in no one’s interest to let online radio die. But people want to make money from their music. And we want to pay artists for the music we play. It’s only fair.

We think – and this is the opinion of the whole Last.fm office, who you can meet on our lovely team page – that turning off the radio is just plain wrong. This has been a no-brainer from day one for us: the users rule, and we serve them. If only one person wants to listen tomorrow, we should serve them. I for one want to listen every day.

Online radio won’t die in a hurry, but it will be hard work. And we don’t deal in silence.

It’s Friday at Last.fm, which means most of the gang are already at The Prince Arthur enjoying their luke-warm pints of Kent’s Best.

As per company tradition, we also snuck a few little features out the door in flagrant violation of the “No Releases On Friday, Jerks!” rule. We wouldn’t want you to have a boring weekend.

Get Your Ritter On

Julian was first out the gate, experimenting with some cool new group page customization options while simultaneously showcasing his slightly disturbing love for chocolate. (Fear not group leaders, this and a whole host of cool new group features will see a full release this summer.)

Top Video Charts

Steve wasn’t to be outdone, however. It’s Friday — make a bowl of popcorn, curl up on the sofa, and enjoy the top music videos on Last.fm.

Lots more goodies coming your way in the next few weeks, as well as a new rack of webservers to help alleviate some of our recent slowness. From all of us in London: turn up the music and have a great weekend!

Found this one in the stats group: Matt Perdeaux created Last.fm Normaliser, a web application that orders your top 50 artists relative to their average song length. His observation:

The album “Geogaddi“ by Boards of Canada lasts one hour and contains 22 tracks, whereas “Young Team“ by Mogwai also lasts one hour but only has 10 tracks. This means I can listen to Mogwai twice as much, and Boards of Canada would still beat them in my rankings. “Lift your skinny fists..“ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor only has four tracks but goes on for more than an hour. Those guys aren’t going to trouble the scorers at all, even though I listen to them a lot.

I suppose a more representative ranking of my musical tastes would be based on the actual time spent listening to an artist, rather than by number of tracks, but I can see that collecting this data would be a much more bandwidth-heavy exercise. It is clearly the easiest data to collect but to measure my attention in discrete tracks isn’t giving a true representation of things.

Matt is using MusicBrainz web services to determine an average song length for your top artists, which means his reweighting approach is not necessarily representative for the songs you actually listened to, but it’s a cool demonstration of his idea nevertheless.

Update — From the comments: it turns out back in January 2006 Andrew Conkling founded a group to lobby that idea, called Users for Last.fm song length tracking. Check it out, it has some interesting discussions!

Yay! Having started this post a week ago, I win the “slowest to blog about @Media” award. (Like usual, it’s been busy at last.HQ)

Last Friday I spoke at the @Media conference alongside the veritable roadrunner-speaker Simon Willison, about how we helped build successful websites. When it came to Last.fm, I really had to give the truth: “Sometimes we fuck up a lot.”

Success is just finding out what works and doing that consistently. How do you find out what works? A lot of trial and error. If you’re interested in what works and what doesn’t, check out the slides. (podcast will be linked here shortly).

The conference was quite a lot of fun. I didn’t get to see all of it—as I was back and forth between the office, but of what I did catch, here are the highlights: Internationalisation guru Richard Ishida (I was quietly laughing through most of his talk recollecting some of our own i18n nightmares); Jason Santa Maria, who has designed some absolutely beautiful websites < wee sigh of jealousy/ > and (eee!) one of my favourite typographers Mark Boulton! (Do check out his slides, it’s a lovely presentation). I was a little worried about meeting him, because heroes always seem to be disappointing in person, but Mark is an exceptionally cool down-to-earth guy.

On the last day, I was looking forward to sparring with Jeremy Keith on the Hot Topics panel and injecting some real-world experience into the proceedings. (The speakers had undeniable experience, but most of the attendees I met had more commercial than theoretical concerns).

The Hot Topics panel didn’t happen for me however, as the conference organisers and Jeremy had different ideas about who should be on the panel. A bit unexpectedly, this led to Jeremy raising the issue of the panel’s diversity.

I wasn’t fussed about not getting to be on Jeremy’s panel (there were small fires to put out at Last.fm HQ anyway), and it really wasn’t a question of having a woman on the panel either. Jeremy’s point is that all factors in choosing a panel need to be carefully weighed, and in his opinion, they weren’t.

By now you’re probably groaning… the issue of diversity always comes up at conferences and we’re all a little sick of hearing about it too. Nonetheless, good on Jeremy for bringing this up; it’s sort of like being the one to tell people to stop playing drums in the office at 2am because the police have been called… not exactly fun, and not something that should really be an issue anyway.

Still not quite sure to make of this non-issue/issue, but for the record, one of my most moving memories was hearing Paula Scher speak for the first time; it completely changed my perspective on my career.

Where was I? Right, process and not being afraid to fuck up. Because the real world is a messy place. Get your idea out; put perfection behind you (as long as you refine it later). There’s often very little room for ideals and balance, especially in this industry.

Additionally, it sounds like Jeremy did a great job of moderating the panel dispite being unable to pick his exemplar group of panelists.

I hate planning my weekends.

Figuring out what’s going on is already hard in any moderately sized city; the metropolises I’ve been living in over the last years are a bitch when it comes to that. The event calendars I’ve used so far all have in common that they allow easy access to everything in their event schedule. They let you browse, they let you search. They also have in common that they let you do the work.

No matter which listings you end up using it’s a lot of work to filter through the crap. I’m personally a little annoyed that planning a weekend often means aggregating and consuming long listings from different sources, where most of the announcements aren’t even interesting to you. (Not to speak of the fact that most big event calendars have a distinct mainstream bias.)

In short, what I really want are better filtering mechanisms.

And the crowd goes wild, by ffg. CC attribution license 2.0.

Modern Event Listings

We’re only starting to get to a point where automated tools take away some of this tedious work. Where we have mechanisms that act as spam filter for event listings.

For a really long time Peter Oliver’s UpcomingScrobbler was the state of the art. It is based on Last.fm’s listening data and Upcoming‘s excellent (if verbose) listings. When you have an active Last.fm account UpcomingScrobbler can search events for artists you’ve been listening to, in a region of your choice, which is a really good filtering mechanism for music-related events. Doesn’t require any work on your side, adapts to your changes in taste.

I also really like to use people as filtering mechanisms. There are a lot of communities, blogs and personal sites where people post interesting announcements, so for you it boils down to finding the right mediator for your taste. In Berlin De:Bug Events is an excellent club-oriented one published by De:Bug magazine, and for a while shesaiddestroy.org was a curated event listing of legendary high quality. In London we have Fail/List, Kultureflash, Lesson No. 1, Plan B, ...

There even are some closed communities that require invitations to join, in an attempt to keep the quality high and the listings on topic. Sometimes it works really well. But the one’s I’ve used had some major drawbacks, often caused by their closed nature. (Berlin has a pretty big one which uses a Flash interface — along with the obvious usability problems. No feeds, no password autocompletion, etc.)

But you get the picture. There are some very good listings, but you still have to spend time browsing through them all. If you can find them in the first place.

In late 2006, a small team of Last.fm developers set out to change that.

Cue Last.fm Events

It’s maybe no surprise that our relatively new events feature is quickly becoming a major attraction: It has rarely been so easy to keep informed of upcoming concerts, catered to your own musical taste. And of course our event recommendations adapt to your changing musical focus — as you listen to new music we’re finding the appropriate events for you. As long as we know about an event we have no problem satisfying even esoteric tastes.

Our events overview page allows you to browse by location and venue — which makes us an excellent worldwide event listing, and a great starting point when you visit other cities. Of course you can set a preferred location so it always displays listings for your area.

The heart of our system is its excellent filtering mechanism. We match your listening profile against a huge database of events, which means all you have to do to get notified of a concert is to scrobble the artist, and the resulting list of events will then show on your dashboard as recommended events, along with concerts your friends go to. You can e.g. use the dashboard, global event pages, or venue pages to browse events, and after you flag your attendance they’ll show up on your profile page as a personal event listing.

Of course we offer a variety of feeds — e.g. personal event feeds, which are an excellent way to keep on top of your local music ecosystem. Subscribe to the event feeds of venues, to your friends feed, or feeds of people in your local area who listen to interesting music. (A good way to find those is to check out the attendees list for events you’ve gone to yourself, I’m sure you’ll find people with well-groomed event attendance lists.)

As a result of all this, Last.fm Events is not only a great listing with a huge database, it’s also a personalised spam filter, and can additionally act as both a collaborative and a curated recommendation mechanism.

Leaving Traces of Pop Culture Context

Roskilde Festival 2006, by Stig Nygaard. CC attribution license 2.0

I also really like that we have a focus on being able to browse past events; other event calendars usually hide everything that’s older than “today”. This is a bit of a selfish feature as we want people to write reviews and post photos, but it has the side-effect of creating a huge canvas of pop culture context. And on venue pages you can browse for photos of past events to check out the ambience of places you’ve never been to.

As a geek I’m quite intrigued by Flickr’s machine tags feature we’re using to create this Last.fm/Flickr integration — it can become the basis for a number of interesting Flickr tools, and I’m confident people will come up with all kind of great ideas. (I’m personally waiting for someone to develop a Flickr tool to automatically geotag your event photos based on the venue address provided by Last.fm.)

All Tomorrow’s Parties

clark @ cargo, by dekstop. CC attribution NC license 2.0, with permission.

I’m curious what your thoughts are on our events system. Does it satisfy your needs? What features are you missing? Are there any event calendars you still like better? If so, which ones, and why?

(I’m now relying on our events system for most of my weekend planning. This weekend I’m spending my evenings at Galvanised festival, right around the corner here in Hackney, East London. Three nights of electronic and noise music, mostly local independent artists. I found out about it because I had listened to full-length previews of one of the artists on Last.fm, which put them in my charts, which made Galvanised show up in my “recommended events” feed.)

We’re pleased to announce the release of Last.fm Music, our first (and certainly not last) Facebook app. A big thanks to everyone who suggested features and ideas over the last week… this is only the beginning but we think it will grow into something pretty cool.

Rapid application development?

Since the launch of Facebook Platform last Thursday, certain parties have been wondering where our application was. The truth is that we were perplexingly left out of Facebook’s early development program, so while some of our competitors had six weeks to work on their stuff, we had to wait until Thursday like everyone else. The past six days have included 11-hour flights between London and San Francisco, a bank holiday weekend, and some very late nights pulled by our creative/webteam uber hax0rs… but less than a week later we have something for you to play with.

What it does

For our first release we decided to focus on something that’s unique to Last.fm, something that everyone on Facebook can use even without a Last.fm profile: our personalized full-length streaming radio. You can showcase any of your stations (or your playlist) along with recently-played tracks on your Facebook page. If you don’t have a Last.fm username, the app creates a station based on the artists listed in your ‘favourite music’ section. We’ve also made it easy to see all your Facebook friends’ stations on one page, so you can quickly see who’s listening now and play their music with a single click. You can even browse new music recommendations and compare compatibility with the Taste-o-meter right from Facebook.

Since you don’t even need a Last.fm account to use the app, you can safely pester all your friends to add it. ;)

What it doesn’t do

Facebook has built a seriously incredible platform for web developers to work with. As with anything new, though, it’s not without some shortcomings. The most serious for us is that it’s currently very difficult to put “real-time” information on profile pages without requiring a click. (This is why we have to put your recently-played tracks in a tab for now, sigh.) We know this is less than ideal, and hopefully this situation will improve soon.

We also didn’t want to spend too long developing something huge, so we’ve left our extremely popular concert and events listings out of the mix for now. Fear not, they’ll be making an appearance soon enough.

On behalf of the whole webteam: have fun and see you on the brave new Facebook! The music has arrived.

Today, Last.fm was acquired by CBS, a company who had the first commercial radio station in the US, ran a record label (CBS Records), and amongst other things are responsible for several respected TV series (CBS on Wikipedia).

The team here have spent a lot of time this year discussing what the future should hold for Last.fm, and while contemplating raising some additional venture capital we were approached by CBS. As you can imagine, we have been approached numerous times in the past few years from all the usual suspects regarding acquisitions and so on; CBS are one of the few companies who needed no explanation of what we are doing, and we were impressed at how progressive their plans are. This deal with CBS gives us a chance to really make Last.fm shine, and gives us more flexibility than other funding options would for doing all the crazy stuff we’ve had scribbled on whiteboards for years.

CBS understands the Last.fm vision, the importance we place on putting the listener in charge, the vibrant and vocal community, the obsession with music stats, and our determination to offer every song ever recorded.

I’ll try and answer all (reasonable!) questions regarding the deal and what it means for Last.fm. Here are some miscellaneous thoughts upfront:

• The Last.fm team stays put in London, we’ll grow the company some more here.
• We will continue to execute our world domination plans – our focus is still music and the surrounding ecosystem. The founders (myself included) are still at the helm.
• We have more resources at our disposal now, and more clout when it comes to negotiating licensing deals etc.
• OH NOES UR SELLIN MY SCROBBLES!!1!! — Don’t panic. The openness of our platform and our approach to privacy won’t change.

There is quite a sense of achievement at Last.fm HQ today, we see this is as a huge boost for Last.fm and we are confident that together with CBS we have the wherewithall to change the music industry, and way people interact with music for good. Now we are all going for a slap up vietnamese lunch at the Viet Hoa. We’ll be back in an hour to finish off our facebook app :)

Are you tired of missing all the prosaic shouts people are leaving in your shoutbox? A couple of weeks ago, our French frontman definitely was. He didn’t hesitate but wrote a Dashboard widget to keep track of them. It gives Mac users a nice way of checking their shouts.

In order to do so, he had to parse the entire page and extract the precious shouts from a giant mess of markup. That wasn’t so nice. And it only worked for Mac users, too. No problem for me, but some Vista-fanboys would go bonkers.

So, from this day on, you may have RSS feeds for every shoutbox you could possibly encounter. All you have to do is go to this page and follow the simple instructions. So basically, just enter this URL: http://tools.microformatic.com/transcode/atom/ hatom/http://www.last.fm/user/USERNAME/shoutbox (You need to remove the space I inserted to make it wrap.)

The URL you have to enter is the URL of the page containing the shoutbox. (Note: for user pages it’s better to use www.last.fm/user/USERNAME/shoutbox as that page is way smaller than your regular user page.)

For those interested in the nitty-gritty details: The shoutboxes have been marked up in a microformat called hAtom. That way, the markup can be very easily parsed and converted to atom or RSS, making your feed reader happy.

I think it has been raining in London everyday since I moved here a few weeks ago. Last Monday was no exception, so instead of checking out the beach at Brighton I decided to spend a fun day at work. Monday was also a bank holiday, and at around midnight I was the only one in the office. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful. My thoughts had deeply sunken into the advantages and disadvantages of different procedures to evaluate computational models of similarity.

At Last.fm we have an IRC channel that we use for internal communications. Everyone logs in wherever they are as long as they have Internet access. Here are some excerpts from our IRC channel from Monday around midnight: (maybe I should add that the line starting with “pub” contains a list of special technical terms that help attract the attention of my colleagues)

<Elias> i think someone just tried to kick the last.fm office door open :-/
<Elias> pub beer porn
<Elias> ...
<Russ> inner one or outer one?
<Elias> I'm inside
<Elias> there was a hell of a noise at the door
<Elias> i went there, saw that part of the door closing system has come off, and there seems to be a hughe crack in the upper part, I'm not sure if that has been there before
<Russ> I don't remember any huge cracks before
<Elias> I guess I should have a look outside? ... are there any weapons around? :-)
<Russ> this is the white one, not the black one right?
<Elias> yes
<Muz> :/
<Russ> there's an electric drill and a pocket knife by my desk

(I’ll skip the advice they gave me on building a fighting robot.)

<Elias> what's the number of the police?
<Elias> i guess i could give them a call and just ask what they recommend?
<Muz> google?
<Russ> you can report crimes online! genius!
<Elias> i tried, but it wasnt the first hit :-)
<Russ> https://online.met.police.uk/
<Russ> Elias: http://www.met.police.uk/hackney/ is the web site
<julian> what's the emergency number in the uk, btw?
<Muz> 999
<Russ> julian: it's 999, heh
<julian> good to know :D
<Russ> 112 also works, I think. Definitely works from mobiles
<Muz> 08 too iirc
<Russ> naaah
<Russ> don't be silly
<Muz> oh?
<Russ> that's french
<Muz> I thought it redirects
<Elias> I'll give them a call and see what they say…
<Russ> Muz: 0845 numbers don't make any sense
<Russ> if that's the case
<Muz> Ahhh, good point
<Elias> duh. 999 doesnt work
<Elias> i get a wrong number signal
<julian> haha
<Russ> wtf
<Muz> lol

I finally got through to the police, they said they’ll send someone over, and then they called back to double-check on the address, and then they called a second time…

<Elias> the police just told me that it was police who did that
<HawkeV> 0-0
<HawkeV> wtf
<Russ> could you ask for it in writing?
<HawkeV> the police broke our door?
<Russ> no
<Elias> she said they had a call earlier saying that someone had collapsed behind the door?!!?
<HawkeV> um…
<HawkeV> so they kicked it once
<HawkeV> then left?
<Russ> the HACKNEY police ∗failed∗ to kick down our door.
<Elias> so they tried to kick the door open and then decided to go away again.
<HawkeV> wtf
<Elias> ??
<Russ> HawkeV: it's fairly sturdy
∗ erikf_ has joined #last.fm
<Elias> i just heard somethihng again…

I went outside to talk to the officers, but there was no one there.

The next day I had a chat with the police. They explained that there was some confusion. There is a building with the same name not too far away. At this other building a lady had collapsed in her flat and her doctor (standing outside the door) had called the police for help to open the door. The police had never been at our office.

Just in case the robbers read this…

Be warned: we are prepared and we got brutal death metal music!!!

If you try this again you’ll be begging for mercy when our speakers blast out the songs by the artist most frequently tagged with BDM!

(And we also got an improved security system now.)

While reading the journal of user Hirenj_au earlier this year I found a reference to the then newly founded Last.fm Stats group, and was delighted by the idea.

The Stats group was founded by user C2600 in late December, but has already passed the 800 members mark, and member count is steadily growing. I’m not surprised—the group manifesto makes it clear that this this is one group to watch:

The main objective of this group is to collect all the interesting tools related to music stats that are scattered around last.fm, to share your stats with other people and discuss about music stats in general.

Fracking great idea if you ask me. I immediately joined (and saw that Mischa already was a member, and invited Erik who is always keen on stats…), and I’ve been watching their findings ever since.

They already have an impressive list of tools and visualisations, and over time we’ll present some of their (and our own) findings on this blog; today I’ll start with something simple.

Last.fm Mainstream-O-Meter

There already are a couple of approaches floating around the community to calculate your ‘mainstreamness’ manually. Here’s a well-designed web application by Luce. that does it for you: the Last.fm Mainstream-O-Meter. After Muz posted it in our internal IRC channel ages ago everybody went crazy for a while…

My score: 11.41% mainstream. So proud…

But of course you can always go lower. We already found out with the Chart Arcs experiment that Anil (aka joanofarctan) is a man of most obscure taste. I just found this comment from Luce. in the Mainstream-o-meter forum discussion:

@bubblesaurusrex—congratz! Until now there’s only one person who listens to music which is stranger than yours: joanofarctan