LastFM removing some ability to personalize listening experience. | Hacker News Reader

LastFM removing some ability to personalize listening experience.

last.fm

28 pointstimmaah25 comments

Groooveshark employee here, so excuse me for the shameless plug. ;) We love last.fm but I've always thought it was more for learning about artists and discovering new ones...and of course tracking everything you listen to and seeing what your friends are listening to. They aren't primarily a streaming music service and cutting those features probably makes it easier for them to cut streaming and licensing costs by being counted purely as a online radio service.

Grooveshark, on the other hand, has the primary focus of letting you search for and listen to whatever you want, but frankly our radio feature isn't as good. So if you want radio with limited control, use last.fm, if you want to listen to what you want to listen to and notghing else, use Grooveshark. :)

I have found this out with my experiments with Grooveshark. The radio feature is TERRIBLE! It takes about 15 minutes before it starts repeating songs; there have been multiple instances where there's no suggestions; it plays bands that you already disliked (or frowned, I guess).

</rant>

Make your radio feature better and you would have a KILLER app!

sincerely,

a paying grooveshark user

I agree, radio is probably our weakest area. We try very hard not to play duplicates, but our underlying data is very messy since most of our content comes from users. Better recs and better deduping are high on my wishlist.

Excuse my cynicism, but what prevents this exact thing from happening to Grooveshark in the future?

Wikipedia says Universal Media Group sued you and that's why Apple took your app down from their App Store just two months ago. It also says you got sued by Pink Floyd and had to take down their tunes.

It starts small, but using major label music will be death by a thousand cuts.

I think the last.fm decision was purely about money. Internet radio streaming is significantly cheaper to license than on demand radio. I can't comment on lawsuits but I think the Wikipedia article is inaccurate. We remove tracks voluntarily so not every takedown is accompanied by a lawsuit. :)

I agree that Last.fm is for statistics-gathering, and Grooveshark is for listening to what you want, but for radio, it's all about Pandora.

BTW, I really appreciate TinySong.

Thats not really fair to Groveshark - I have enjoyed searching for artists and listening to a lot of their tracks.

The only issue (but it is a big one) is the complete reliance on flash and the inability to integrate with my pause, forward stop buttons on my keyboard.

The destop app supports media keys, with installation of the appropriate platform specific helpers. :) As far as I know, no sites support media keys directly because browsers don't make them available, even to extensions. If anyone has example sites that can do this we'd love to see them...and figure out how they are doing it. ;)

DMCA compliance, or at least DMCA-as-interpreted-by-various-labels compliance.

Shame about loved tracks, but the "my library" station is the best, and that will still work.

I think it's more likely just an attempt to reduce their license fees.

The music licensing societies (at least in the UK) have different classes of license, at different price points, and licenses which allow "interactive use" are much more expensive. The distinction is (IANAL) about whether or not the user has detailed control over what tracks they listen to, and in what order.

The features they're removing sound a lot like "interactive use":

  * Loved Tracks Radio: streaming your list of loved tracks

  * Playlists: streaming a list of tracks you've chosen for a playlist

  * Personal Tag Radio: streaming a list of artists, albums or tracks that you have tagged

Yes, it's an interactive/non-interactive distinction in play. (DMCA has become a synonym for "non-interactive" in the industry.)

Last.fm has always argued that these radio modes were non-interactive, but the labels have clearly got the better of them.

Those also used to be their main selling points for folks subscribe to lastfm.

Their revenue from subscriptions must not be enough to affect their decisions with regards to license fees

It's sad, but record companies destroy any potential for Internet based music. Music apps last only so long before they get sued or need to restrict your listening freedom in some way.

The other thing that happens to the cool little music upstarts is that they get bought by a big parent company (like CBS buying Last.fm or Apple buying LaLa), who inevitably either makes horrible changes at the expense of existing users or re-purposes the app to suggest only major label artists.

My understanding is that anything that allows the user to choose what specific tracks they want to hear is deemed "interactive" by the industry, and costs an awful lot more than "non-interactive". "Non-interactive" appears to mean streams which the user can only broadly determine the content of (i.e. genre or like-artist 'stations'), can't allow skipping over tracks too aggressively, and who knows what other restrictions.

I don't have any idea as to how big of a difference in licensing fees we're talking about here, and I know it's very hard to make a buck in this sphere with so many vampires in the picture. But not paying up for interactive seems like a really bad call on last.fm's part (and/or suggests that they are in pretty rough shape as profits go). The list of things they're removing is essentially a list of "all the reasons why I might be interested in using last.fm".

Unless there's something I'm missing, the headline here seems a little exaggerated.

I guess it is. They appear to be removing all the reasons I signed up for lastfm and the main way I use it.

* Library and recommended stations remain

Yeah from the article it really looks like one of those "screw you our long-time customer" actions disguised as a bland update. Are other people irritated too?

"last.fm removing all the reasons I signed up" would have been a great headline.

you are right. i loved last.fm and was gladlly paying my month subscription. Now that they are removing useful functionality im not standing behind that company.

i guess grooveshark deserves a chance.

Not all ability, you still have tags and artists. But not personal tracks you have tagged and your loved tracks radio, i will miss my loved tracks.

This doesn't seem to affect the (free) "My Library" station.

Paying lastfm user here. Won't be come November 17th. The only reason I pay is for my loved tracks, to stream anywhere on anyone's laptop.

See also: Caldwell's talk from Startup School on the challenges facing music startups

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-caldwe...

I'm a heavy lastFM user and yet used none of these functions that they are removing. For me my iPod/netbook fills the role of loved tracks and playlists. I'd rather not waste bandwidth streaming tracks which I already have on various devices.

Scrobbling isn't very heavy. Unless you're paying, I wouldn't call you a heavy user.

It's odd that they would do this. They should have ramped up the price of the subscription for some of those features instead.

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