Last.fm has one feature that is keeping it going: personal charts, radio and recommendations that are the results of years of scrobbling in some cases: glorious heaven for all the statistic loving music nerds around the world.
Yet somewhere along the line, Last.fm forgot how to be exciting, social and even how to be a proper tool for musicians. I fear now Last.fm is heading in a similar direction as Myspace has been for the past year: oblivion. Many people do have a Last.fm account, but what percent (still) deems it an essential part of their online experience? Who still uses it for anything but scrobbling (and possibly listening)?
Last.fm missed the train to essentialville. Which is a shame. A lot of people still go to Myspace for the music player and bands know this, thus they still use Myspace. Facebook has its own music player and it’s a matter of time until the majority switches. Likewise, people still use Last.fm because of the scrobbling music feature and personal radio. But like Myspace isn’t going to survive because of the music player, it is only a matter of time before Last.fm is replaced. For Last.fm to grow and survive, it needs to evolve and it needs to evolve fast.
Here’s 5 ways:
- Better profiles – Yes, the stats are nice, but profile-wise there isn’t a lot you can do on Last.fm. Users have been putting badges and images in their “About me”-fields for years, yet Last.fm failed to recognise the need for a “badge”-field. Why not make that a feature? You can adjust your profiles to the way your users try to use them. It will make the website more fun to use and less likely to fade into oblivion.
- Improve the features for artists and labels. Last.fm’s Music Manager is much better than Myspace reporting and administrating features used to be. Still, it’s no Bandcamp either. If Last.fm can improve their artist features, fans will follow their idols. The Last.fm community could benefit from special features, like rewarding top fans with a free track from their favourite band or with free plays and/or premiering new songs on on Last.fm instead of elsewhere?
- Continuing the Bandcamp-comparison. Bandcamp doesn’t try to be a full-blown social network – instead it draws strength from the possiblity to embed their tools in official websites, social networks and other platforms. You still get the detailed tools from Bandcamp, but the visitors of your other (bigger) platforms. Meanwhile, Last.fm has been writing mediocre tools for Facebook that you have to update manually. Nobody wants that. So make better, exciting tools that people can embed on Facebook or other networks. If other people like them, they’ll sign up to make their own.
- Use your plug-ins, apps and software. While there are iPhone and Android apps, they don’t enhance social features enough. While you’re using the app you should be able to use the shoutbox, easily recommend tracks to friends, view updates in your music network… And share all that on other social networks with a fingertip. And why haven’t they created a truly mind-blowing iPad 2 experience? The phone apps looks gorgeous, so the designers are there… Oh, and make all your apps available worldwide already… Just saying.
- The Last.fm community page features stats like “32 million scrobbles everyday” and “409 scrobbles in the last second.” Cool. But what are these stats doing on my community page? When I login, shouldn’t this page know I’ve been using Last.fm for years and help me make it more fun? By showing a social version of the login homepage (which features recent additions to your library and what your friends are listening to now), with new suggestions and features?
Since CBS acquired Last.fm, the music network should be upping their game, not continue acting as if it is the next indie website on the block. There was a time when people were proud to become a subscriber for a couple of euros per month. Those times have gone and people have been falling out of love with the website since changes to the subscription plan were made and listening to music became a paid feature in most countries. Since then, the website has been acting surprisingly traditional for what is supposed to be a hip and happening website. The result: it is no longer hip and happening and besides the scrobbling and streaming features the website is lacking in many ways. And there will be other websites like that. One of these days, either Spotify or another competitor will improve their radio features and that could be the final blow for Last.fm. And when that happens, Last.fm won’t last much longer.
I agree that Last.fm has to improve the musician experience. However, as a music listener, I think Last.fm offers more than a lot of other music services out there. It scrobbles my music from my iPod, I can connect with my friends and see how musically compatible we are, and I like that I can listen to it through my smartphone and Xbox 360.
Some good points but more people use it than you think, I use it like a klout for music. Checking what artists I may like and what music I listen too the most, etc. The iPhone and XBOX apps are quite popular from what i’ve seen and it’s the best at reccomending concerts. It’s not dead yet and it’s got a nice design but I guess adding features over time unlike myspace which was somewhat left to rot is a good idea. Badges is a fun idea.
Oh and it’s almost a cloud music player although I use spotify which it can scrobble from btw, when i’ve tested the personal radio station on it it played music it knows i’ll like as it uses the knowlege from the 10′s of thousands of songs i’ve scrobbled.
@Andrew Brackin I like scrobble-feature in Spotify, in fact, that’s what got me thinking about this subject in the first place. I’m very excited by Spotify – as excited as I used to be about Last.fm… Can you imagine what killer combination Spotify and Last.fm could be? Combine the features of both and improve some social things and you have the ultimate music experience online – quite possibly.
The experience of scrobbling and all advantages it gives are keeping users on last.fm, but many people say that the experience is poorer and I agree with some complains:
1- grooveshark is better for listeners who don’t have their music in hands at all times (like, at work) this compared to last’s pro account2- the crowdsourced tags are getting messier and messier along these years3- artists are indexed by THEIR NAMES! a lot of them are marked as “multiple artists” and song lists are mixes from 2 or more.
And add to this the “apps aren’t social” and “we need more features (badges!)” points that you already listed.
I do agree with you but Last.fm is still awesome because it connects to all the places I listen to music, and recommends me new stuff. Its as simple as that and thats why I keep using it. For a service that is nearly 10 years old- thats pretty rare.
P.S Didn’t Last.fm pretty much build the road that Spotify, Grooveshark etc are on? When Last.fm started, the idea of streaming music you didn’t own must have been a pretty tough bizarre concept for record labels to get their heads around, but the hipsters in East London managed to convince them to change their ways. This is pretty much the future of music consumption now, even if the economics are in their early stages.
@langdan You’re right, they did build the road. But it’s 2011 now… What’s next? Don’t get me wrong! I love the scrobbling and the personal radio feature. But the website is not evolving at all right now…
@langdan I agree with @Stefan Meeuws . Last.fm was the service that first opened the road, but the web is changing, very quickly. The reason mpst people still use Last.fm these days that they can find -every- artist they want to listen, stats, an of course, scrobbling. These are awesome, but Last.fm can’t go on like this. If they just don’t be more social, another service is just going to take the lead. (I’ve been using Last.fm for plenty of time now and it needs badges, probably more stats, better moderation, and nore sharing features, and a new comment system, just to name a few. Spotify is pretty good too, especially because its user interface is just a lot easier to use)
Along came Grooveshark and I stopped using last.fm (also stopped using others like blip.fm). Quite frankly the experience that Grooveshark offered me was more focused on the music than on the social networking aspect of it. I’m not very familiar with Spotify, but I think it is along he same lines. Also the fact that they got acquired by CBS was a bit of shooting themselves on the foot.
On the other hand, other community based platforms like soundcloud seem to be catching on in a more fundamental aspect, which is sharing your own stuff and being more open.
The sale of last.fm essentially put the service into second class status. Hopefully the recent changes at CBS Interactive will get them to either consolodate all their music apps (anybody ever hear of play.it?) and pick one good platform. At least that’s what should happen. Only time will tell.
I’ve been using last FM since it beta’d and was enamoured with the ability to discover new artists and unknown acts and even genres.
However, over the last 18 months my dedication and passion to its uses has wained. As a music journalists and photographer, I ceased tagging images on Flickr simply because I was not seeing the referral traffic I wanted, in face the event section as a whole has drastically become diluted.
I also run a record label and manage a band and as mentioned the management tools are poor, beyond poor they’re worthless, I have to travel to a band page to add new tour dates? why I have already stated I own the catalogue I should be able to facilitate it all.
As an artists, never made anything from it and I have found that refusing to pay for powerplay’s means I have never suddenly heard one of my tracks on random genre or artist like plays.
Last.fm is going to have to work very hard to recover particular with the recent explosion of rootmusic pages for Facebook which for $19.99 a year gives you the ability to centralize all your content.
you guys are right.. the site just does not evolve at all..
PS. for those who didnt know ‘Last.fm music player’ extension for chrome can play all songs on the site =) even when closing the site (runs the songs in the extension)
“rewarding top fans with a free track from their favourite band or with free plays and/or premiering new songs on on Last.fm instead of elsewhere”
This is exactly what disrupt.fm is trying to do. I launched the site two months ago as a platform for musicians to release new tracks to their facebook fans. If people like the song then can download it for free in return for sharing it with their friends on facebook. check it out at:
Http://www.disrupt.fm
My favorite, among many types of tech blog posts, are the ones where people with no product experience, argue that something will fail because it no longer offers free feature X and instead suggest to make the product more like the other products out there. Nicely done :)
@Anthony Volodkin Thanks ;)… I’m not saying Last.fm will no longer work because it’s not completely free anymore. I don’t believe things need to be free (especially not if that means you will go bankrupt). People are scrobbling via their music players and Spotify and / or are using Last.fm’s radio feature. For both features, I don’t need to visit their website. Even my top artists appear in my Twitter timeline. I reckon Last.fm would like me to visit and use their website. This post is a way of improving that website so that I’m more likely to use it again on a daily basis.
I wouldn’t be surprized if the founders of Last.fm would buy it back from CBS for 10 million dollars. There is a fiscal rule in the US that makes it attractive to sell it under 10 million (then CBS can write off the whole purchasing price at once).
This happened with Bebo. Will last.fm be next?
What about concerts? To me there are only two places to talk about concerts: Last.fm and Facebook. And on Facebook the experience is so convoluted that it’s hard to keep track, so I prefer Last.fm.
Last.fm is still my favorite network where I find new music, because it collect automatically every obscure project that ever scrobbled. Along with the similar artists it’s still the best way to find out new music. The shoutboxes are informative too if an enthusiatic fan shout about the latest news (ok, there are lot of stupid comments too). The event listing to each artist makes it much better. And there are still people who contribute to wikipages etc. So it’s the best centralised database of music.
I think it’s unattractive for unknown projects to upload their music. The MusicManager for bands is a mess and feels abandoned from development.
I remember, 2 years ago they splitup the album listening experience to generate more pageviews. This was bad and makes lfm unattractive to listen to music on their page (beside the radio).
Stats are still nice, but it’s true, they should go a step further. I don’t know how, but hopefully not in the way myspace or facebook do.
I used to love last.fm as a listener, but as a musician it has become a source of irritation for me. There is another artist trying to use our name in Australia, although we’ve had the name for many more years than they have, and someone has added their information to our page. According to Last.fm’s rules, we have to leave it there for disambiguation. It also means that we appear to be on tour on the same day in both Canada and Australia, and tracks by another artist show up as ours. Why would we EVER promote this confusing, misleading page to our fans?
4 years ago I stumbled upon last.fm’s website and I use it exclusively for my own stats in keeping up with what I am listening too. I also hope to find others with similar music interests. Everything you have mentioned in your blog post is so true. I am annoyed that I can no longer stream albums on the website and I have to find other services that I can “scrobe” my music into last.fm. It surprises me that a lot of music artists haven’t seen the value of what their listeners listen to besides their work. I have tried RELENTLESSLY to get musicians to use the service but I don’t think they get it. Or if they do get it, they don’t put in the time to see last.fm’s value. The main love that I have with last.fm is that I have met so many people internationally who have similar listening habits that I have and I am so grateful for that connection. That’s what makes last.fm priceless to me!! : D [I am @2Serenity on last.fm]
I love last.fm because of its features to find new music similar to your own