Last.fm – the Blog

Last.fm has always been about recommending you new music, but that’s pretty hard to do for anyone new to the service. We need to know what music you’re into before we can recommend more music to you – right?

We call this the “cold start problem”. Up until now we have asked you to tell us what artists you like in order to kickstart your profile, but from today new users can use Facebook Connect to populate your Last.fm profile with any artists you like on Facebook. Neat, huh?

It means we can start delivering you new music recommendations straight away, and give you a better experience of Last.fm from the moment you create your account.

You also have the option of using your Facebook profile pic, name, birthdate and other info to help complete your Last.fm profile. All of this information is editable, allowing you to select only the details you want to bring across to Last.fm, and you even have the option to trash all of it and start from scratch with just one click.

Actually, we’ve made a few changes to social features recently. We’ve renamed the Facebook ‘Like’ button to ‘Recommend’ (no change to functionality though) and also added the new Facebook ‘Send’ button. The Send button allows you to recommend an event, track or artist to specific friends or groups on Facebook as a message to their inbox rather than publishing to everyone via your feed, pretty useful for music you really don’t want your friends to miss out on but don’t want to spam everyone else with.

There’s more coming soon too, including the ‘Friend Finder’ – helping you find and add your friends from other platforms – which we’ll be launching in the next few weeks.

Please don’t forget to give us feedback about features like these on the forums.

Edit: we’ve updated the image of the Audio Flower to give you a better idea of what it visualises.

We’ve been thrilled with the all support we’ve been getting from users who are helping us rate the tempo of music tracks in our Speedo experiment, thanks! Now we’d like to ask you to help us with another fun music experiment for a new project called Audio Flowers.

We are currently doing some research into new techniques to measure structural change (or “complexity”) in rhythm, harmony and timbre directly from mp3 files. The measurements we take from a song are then summarised to produce a little image: an Audio Flower like the one below.

Here’s a description of what the ‘flower’ above is showing us.

We can tell straight away that Mr. Roboto by Styx has strong long term changes: the end of the red rhythm petal is quite thick – as are ends of the harmony and timbre petals. In fact, this suggests that the song is organised in distinctive parts.
Let’s have a closer look at the red rhythm petal then: towards the middle of the petal, its main, opaque part is much thinner then at the tip. This indicates that for most of the song there is little mid-term rhythmic change. However, you can see from the translucent part that there must be some sections of the song with atypically many rhythmic changes … find out if you agree here (link to YouTube).

Find more examples here.

We think this visualisation could be used by other people who’d like to find out about the complexity of music, and that’s why we want to publish the technique at an international scientific conference later this year.

But here’s the problem: although we’re quite happy with our signal processing magic (which automatically guesses the amount of structural change going on in the music), we don’t know yet if human beings like yourself feel the same way as the computers… and we need to know that in order to convince the scientists to publish our results.

The new Audio Flowers demo is similar to the Speedo demo; just listen to short excerpts of tracks on screen and answer a couple of simple questions.

We really hope you can help us again by listening and voting! If you like the Audio Flowers, please tell us, and we’ll see if we can make more of them available for your favourite songs.

We need your help. For several years scientists have been trying to extract meaningful information about music directly from the audio data in a track. Encouraged by successes in automatic speech recognition, for a while researchers hoped that it would be fairly easy for a computer to analyze an audio track and transcribe it directly to sheet music notation, recognising instruments, voices, and all the notes they were playing.

This was quickly found to be a much harder problem than expected, and a new field of research grew out of the failure to conquer this challenge.

Since then scientists have battled to recognise specific aspects of a song, such as its tempo, key, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, or even just its genre, by analyzing its audio content. Starting in 2004, this battle has been formalised into an annual competition called MIREX.

In each round of MIREX, competitors submit their programs to a carefully controlled competition server, where each program is run on the same set of tracks. The winner is the one whose results agree most closely with a matching set of human judgements.

But gathering human opinions about very specific aspects of large numbers of songs isn’t easy. You need to find people with a keen interest in music, and ideally some musical expertise. You need to persuade them to answer questions that can seem obvious to them (even though they are still difficult for a computer). Finally you need to have enough helpers to allow for the fact that some interesting musical questions can have more than one ‘right’ answer.

We’ve been thinking about this problem recently, while evaluating some rival algorithms to estimate the tempo, or beats per minute, of songs directly from audio… and we thought of you! We know from many years’ experience that Last.fm users have the interest, the knowledge, and the sheer staying-power to make a huge contribution to scientific research in this field. As an extra incentive, improving these methods could help us offer you even better radio and recommendations in the long run.

To test this idea in practice, we’ve built a very simple application on our labs website where you can listen to music and help us improve the state of the art in tempo estimation. If you have fun with this, we plan to add to it over the coming weeks and months.

So please lend us your ears for a few minutes. Thank you!

Last Friday, 29th of April, was a big day for Prince William and Kate Middleton, and a great excuse for a party for the rest of us… We even set up a special radio station for the big day. But we spotted a bit of an oddity in the scrobbling logs. Not everyone, it seems, was caught up in the wave of patriotic royalism that swept Britain that weekend.

Sitting at number 84 in the UK chart for that day was the Sex Pistols‘ anarchist anthem, God Save The Queen.

About 1 in every thousand listeners in Britain scrobble God Save The Queen on a typical day (not counting Last.fm radio listens), which isn’t bad going. But on the day of the Royal Wedding it hit nearly five times that, far more than on any other day in the last 12 months.

Originally released in 1977 for the Queen’s silver jubilee, the track was banned by the BBC and other broadcasters for its incendiary lyrics, but shot to the top of the charts nonetheless.

Even in 2011, with Sid Vicious long since departed and Jonny Rotten making TV ads for butter, the song has kept its angry appeal — as the chart above shows.

So here’s to our listeners for keeping the punk spirit alive — we mean it, maaaaaaan.

Since 1995, Camden Crawl has established itself as the May Day Bank Holiday weekend’s hottest ticket, and even though it had competition from the Royal Wedding this year it was a great way of kicking our live series Last.fm Presents into gear for the summer season.

The baroque setting of Koko was the venue for our own stage, treating Camden to a cocktail of seven UK acts rising the Hype Charts. First up was Dinosaur Pile-Up, a band touched by the hand of grunge, whose track “My Rock ‘n’ Roll” proved a mission statement for the night. Lethal Bizzle is a star of Last.fm’s grime tag, and he embraced the spirit of Camden Crawl with a stage dive ahead of indie rockers Mazes, who’ve featured heavily in our Hype Chart over the past month.

British Sea Power transformed the Last.fm Presents stage into an ode to nature: foliage sprung up as footage of sea birds played. Epic favourites such as “Waving Flags” gained the biggest reception, before the sets took a turn for the electronic with the last two acts.

Simian Mobile Disco proved that knob-twiddling needn’t be a static affair, and the crowd agreed – four levels of Koko got down to “Audacity of Huge” and “Hustler”– while Hudson Mohawke excelled as last performer of the evening, his mix of r ‘n’ b vocals and groundshaking bass making for a warped electro trip into the night.

If you’re feeling like you missed out on a brilliant night, well, you sort of did. No fear though, Last.fm Presents have a packed festival season ahead this summer.

If you are heading down to (deep breath) The Great Escape, ATP, Liverpool Sound City, Get Loaded, Sonisphere, Rock Werchter, Truck, Field Day, Underage, Summer Sundae or SW4 then keep an eye out for our LFM lobbyists who’ll be ready to shower you with Last.fm goodies, including our tag stickers.

It’s going to be a great summer!

Hey, look! It’s a pause button! I know right?!

Pause is a feature that users and staff alike have been requesting for quite some time, so one dreary Thursday evening I decided ‘Enough is enough! We NEED pause and we need it now!’

That’s almost true anyway. It’s been a big challenge to implement, and we’ve spent a little while testing this feature — writing some supporting infrastructure and making sure the feature works well across our different players.

That’s right, the Android and iPhone client also now come with pause too. We’re working on a new version of the desktop client now, and that will come with pause too.

I’ve been getting a ton of use out of it and I hope you guys do too! The specs are now available for partner players (like XBox and Windows Phone 7) to support the feature, and we’ll be updating the FAQ as and when they’ve implemented it.

Drum Roll – It’s time for the main feature!

But… but but but, we’re also releasing something new and exciting into the wild today.

Whenever you tune into a radio station on Last.fm we build a playlist of tracks based on various criteria: for Recommended Radio we’re looking at music that you might like based on what you’ve been listening to recently; for Friends Radio we’re looking at what your friends have listened to recently… and so on and so forth.

Up until now we haven’t surfaced why a particular song is being played to you, but that’s about to change with a little feature that puts some info text in the top left of the player.

When you’re listening to Similar Artist Radio or your Library Radio we’ll show you some information about the track being played (the song selection is kinda obvious — it’s in your library, or it’s similar to the artist you typed in).

Things start to get a little more interesting when you’re tuned to Friends, Neighbours, Recommended or Mix radio. You’ll see information about which artists or users fed into the song selection. If you click the “more” link you’ll scroll down to where there’s a little more detailed information; maybe it’s a few of your friends or a few artists that inspired the selection.

(By the way, if you’re using the Festive cheer or Bah! Humbug! radio settings then you’ll get a reduced amount of information. If you want to experience the magic you’ll have to turn them off for now, sorry!)

Hope you enjoy them! Remember, you can always offer feedback about features like these on the forums, and if you want to join the team who made them just head to the Jobs page.

Every spring the music industry descends upon the capital city of Texas to celebrate music in its many facets, genres & tags even. You see where this is going don’t you?

After a two year hiatus we’re bringing back the live SXSW tagging bonanza so that you can go nuts across town with those little red tag stickers. Here’s something to refresh your memory:

It’s simple really; whenever you see someone with sticker sheets in hand ask them to give you a couple so you can share them with your friends and start tagging the real world SXSW.

The fun doesn’t stop there of course! We encourage you to take pictures of your guerrilla tagging, upload your pics to flickr and tag them with ‘tagsxsw2011’ and ‘lastfm:event=1732494’ (that’s right we’re talking about flickr tags now – keep up!).

We’ve also updated the Band Aid group page so that you can easily find the bands you’d be crazy to miss this year! Enter your Last.fm username and you’re on your way.

If you want to could browse the full line up as well as your recommended line up just head to the SXSW 2011 Festival Page. Remember; the bands with the little burning flame icons next to them are the – yes – hot ones, who are destined for big big things in 2011 and beyond.

Finally we’ve got a little mission for you: SXSW has always tons of official showcases & shows, but equally there are a plethora of unofficial shows in someone’s backyard. If you happen to see that we’re missing bands you know are performing in some way shape or form at this year’s SXSW, please take 2 minutes to add them to the line up.

Thank you, and see you in Austin!

PS: if you want to get in touch while I’m out there, please do; follow @baumschlager on Twitter.

You may have noticed last week that a new update to the Last.fm iPhone app has hit the App Store. Yes, 3.0 is out, and it’s looking great.

Since we released Last.fm for the iPhone back in July 2008, the app has been focused primarily around streaming radio. This has now all changed in the latest release; 3.0 does more with the vast amounts of user contributed artist information and event information Last.fm has, as well as bringing you personalised recommendations and music listening stats.

Here’s a run down of the new features:

Profile Page

• Top Weekly Artist Chart
• Your recently listened tracks
• Overview of what your friends are listening to on Last.fm

Events Page

• See the events you’re attending (including information about support acts and a quick link to a map of the venue)
• See what gigs Last.fm recommends you
• Find gigs near you
• See which gigs your friends are attending

Music Search Page

• Browse through the Last.fm music catalogue
• Artist Biographies containing trivia (great for cheating at a pub quiz music round!)
• View similar artists.

As a treat to subscribers we’ve also enhanced the radio by introducing Friends Radio – a mix of the music your Last.fm friends have listened to. You can also edit any personal or network station with the new tag filtering feature, allowing you to refine the station you’re listening to by a relevant tag. For example at the moment I’m listening to a lot of Friends Radio filtered by the Rock tag.

(I’m also sure that iPhone4 users will also appreciate the new graphics we’ve used for retina displays)

These new features are just the beginning of what is possible using our API. If you’re interested in taking a look at the code or tweaking it, our iPhone client is open sourced under GPL3 and is available on github.

If you haven’t already updated to the latest version then please do. More information is available from the iTunes App Store.

Last, but not least, our Last.fm mobile apps are up for an Appy! Thanks for your votes, keep ‘em coming!

We all know Last.fm listeners are achingly hip, resolutely individualistic, and far too cynical to be taken in by the annual cards-and-roses marketing-fest called Valentine’s Day, right?

Well… perhaps not. We wondered, with years worth of data at our fingertips, if we could see whether February 14th brought out the sentimental side of our listeners.

This Is Not A Love Song

In order to listen to love songs, you have to find them first. So we started our investigation with the tags Romantic and Love Songs. Tags are supplied by listeners, so their presence alone is enough to give away the fact that at least some of you are softies at heart.

Of course, ‘Romantic’ music can also refer to 19th-century pieces by the likes of Brahms and Schubert, so we went to our database and extracted the top-scoring tracks associated with both Romantic and Love Songs.

This gave us a stack of 30 songs by the likes of Lionel Richie, Barry Manilow, Bryan Adams and Ronan Keating.

What Time Is Love?

We wanted to find out whether there were specific times when our listeners were feeling particularly loved-up. So we scanned our scrobbling logs for 2010, and for each day counted the number of listeners who’d played at least one of the love songs in our test set. 30 songs is a tiny fraction of the millions of tracks scrobbled to Last.fm every day, but even so there’s a clear spike on February 14th:

Click image for full-size version.

Put It In A Love Song

But tags are only one way of looking at the data. They tell us what people say about their music, but we wanted to turn the question around: what artists do people listen to especially on Valentine’s Day?

To answer this question, you can’t just look at the top 10 or top 100 artists. After all, Last.fm listeners’ music taste is incredibly diverse, and for the most part the overlap is made up of the latest hits. For example, here’s the top 5 tracks played on Valentine’s Day 2010:

1. Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
2. Ke$ha – TiK ToK
3. Lady Gaga – Poker Face
4. Owl City – Fireflies
5. Lady Gaga – Paparazzi

Could be any other day in February 2010 really. But by comparing people’s listening habits on Valentine’s Day to another day of the year you can see what music becomes temporarily more popular than usual when people are in the mood for love.

So, we took the scrobbling logs for February 14th for the last six years and pulled out a shortlist of the artists who made it into the top 1000 that day but not seven days later (the 21st – a relatively unromantic day).

We added up the number of times an artist appeared in the shortlist between 2005 and 2010 and ranked them by this score, breaking ties by average popularity on Valentine’s Day.

So, after all the number-crunching, here’s the Top 10 Valentine’s Day artists for Last.fm listeners:

1. Barry White, the undisputed master of romance
2. BoA
3. Pete Yorn
4. Sixpence None the Richer
5. Tiga
6. Wire
7. Sam Cooke
8. Shania Twain
9. Mandy Moore
10. Daphne Loves Derby

So there you have it. The late and lamented Barry White, leader of the Love Unlimited Orchestra, melter of the hearts of housewives everywhere and crooner of the likes of Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe, You’re The First, The Last, My Everything and It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me, takes his rightful place on top of your Valentine’s Day chart.

The runners-up span a vast range of tags — from Romantic and Love of course (Shania Twain, Mandy Moore and Sam Cooke), to Electroclash (Tiga) and Post-Punk (Wire); what a diverse bunch you are.

For more technical details about this post, see Andrew’s journal.
Last.fm is hiring! If you like crunching big data, come and work for us as a Data Scientist.

On February 15, the radio service built into Last.fm mobile apps and on home entertainment devices will become an ad-free, subscriber-only feature.

Last.fm Radio will remain free on the Last.fm website in the US, UK and Germany and for the US and UK users of Xbox Live and Windows Mobile 7 phones. We’ll also continue to offer radio for free via the Last.fm desktop app.

I want to explain why we’re making some of these changes.

On the Last.fm website an ad-supported, free-to-listeners model is what supports our online radio services in the US, UK and Germany. In other markets and on emerging mobile and home entertainment devices, it is not practical for us to deliver an ad supported radio experience, but instead, we will migrate to what we believe is the highest quality, lowest cost ad-free music service in the world.

We believe our radio -whether it’s a personalised station or artist and tag radio – is the best in the world and we’re proud of the depth and range of our catalogue of music from major labels, indies and unsigned artists. We’re committed to building Last.fm into a bigger service that gives listeners the best music discovery experience anywhere while financially supporting and promoting the artists who make the music we love.

You’ll see that this change brings us in line with other music services that already charge you to listen to music on mobile devices. For the cost of a fancy coffee, a Last.fm monthly subscription allows you to listen to radio across all platforms, on all your devices, and without commercial interruptions.

This change only affects the radio component of Last.fm’s services on mobile and home entertainment devices. Other features of our service — like scrobbling, music and event recommendations, social networking and community forums, and Last.fm’s wiki-based artist information pages — remain free to users worldwide.

You can read more about the devices that will require a subscription here, you can visit our subscriptions page to learn more, and join the conversation on our forums.