Last.fm Radio to be killed off in most countries next month | Hacker News Reader

Last.fm Radio to be killed off in most countries next month

thenextweb.com

46 pointsrevorad48 comments

Last.fm seems to be slowly buckling under pressure from record labels. At some point recently at the behest of the labels, they started limiting the number of skips you were allowed on each station, to something absurdly low like 5. Not even subscribers are allowed more. It's a shame to see CBS's legal team put its concerns ahead of Last.fm and its users.

I stopped using last.fm when I found out my subscription worked on my computers, but not on my phone. Even if phone was on wifi, it was absurd. Why limit country on phone but not on computer? Since I had to be more and more outside without easy access to desktop I jus tstopped paying and using them.

Last.fm was great before CBS, I used to use it all the time. It had one of the better algorithms out there for suggesting music and it introduced me to a lot of great bands after I'd been out of listening to music for a while. Then, for whatever reasons I just stopped using it.

I still think it's by far the best "here's a band, give me more like it" music suggester. Some how it understands the essence of the band I love and finds lots of bands that are just as good. And many of those bands are so obscure I don't know how I would have found them otherwise.

I'd hate to see that technology lost given how poor the alternatives for this are right now. Genius, as a comparison is just terrible. Musicbrainz is pretty much impossible to use (and terrible).

For half of the music I listen, this is true. The rest it just doesn't get.

I abandoned Last.fm when shortly after the CBS takeover they did a 180 and became the mouthpiece of the record labels instead of a disruptive force.

I didn't mind so much that they had to compromise, but the classic recording industry PR-speak they used to justify it was just offensive. Shortly afterwards they pretty much stopped communicating and innovating altogether.

A shame, because for discovery I still haven't found anything better than Last.fm's combination of "scrobbling" and community.

The only reason I use last.fm is the scrobbling, I'd love it if they'd focus on music analytics more than radio. The moody pdf report in their playground is amazing.

http://playground.last.fm/

Same. I switched to spotify (and spotify radio, which is free) a while ago. But I still scrobble everything and it's cool to look back! Not to mention you can do a lot with the data.

> But I still scrobble everything and it's cool to look back!

Unclear what you mean. They both scrobble, do you aggregate them together someplace?

I do the same. You can fill in your last.fm username in Spotify. Spotify also has an last.fm app. The music you listen to scrobbles to facebook as well as last.fm. Edit: Oh I think he meant, scrobble in the sense of keeping track of what you listen to. You don't have to keep using the last.fm desktop client.

Is anyone else worried about their listening data? I've got music play tracking in there back to 2006. Does anyone else do what they do with tracking, and does tracking alone give last.fm a viable business model?

I've been worried about the same thing. A few months ago I scraped all my scrobble data from last.fm with a python script I found online: http://encukou.github.com/lastscrape-gui/

You can even move all your data to libre.fm. I didn't do this because a few of my music programs (ahem spotify) only support last.fm.

You should see this comment about changing your hosts file: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4917367

Libre.fm[0] have a compatible api for scrobbling but it doesn't seem to have had very much activity as a project and you'll have to add an entry to your hosts file (or otherwise alter your DNS) so that applications such as spotify talk to their servers instead of last.fm's.

http://libre.fm/

I would be interested to know too. It would be nice if there was an open way to track listening data, but I assume it would depend on whatever APIs the music player would allow?

I hope there will be a way to export my listening data if they ever decide to stop offering their scrobbling service.

As I mentioned in another comment, I've used this script and it worked well. You can also migrate your data to libre.fm.

http://encukou.github.com/lastscrape-gui/

Anyone tried this? http://www.easyclasspage.de/lastfm/seite-12.html

You can probably use their API to do so. If not, you can scrap everything without much trouble.

I've been using Last.fm since 2005 and the radio was always great because its been logging almost everything (aside from an occasional CD) I've ever listened to since then.

I have recently moved to Rdio and its great but I am sad to see this end.

Last.fm used to be one of my favorite website, but after the CBS acquired they somehow stagnated, and I drifter away...

Stagnation like this seems to happen a lot when a fat and happy industry leader buys a young an innovative startup.

I'm more interested in the stats/scrobble part than the radio but it's too bad they are not adding new features (More stats/graphs/...). It kind of feels like a dead project.

If there would be a site tracking your listening stats and giving decent recommendations based on your previous listening habits (Maybe even add last.fm import) i'd consider paying for it. This could work like trakt.tv where everyone is able to use the site but there are still some bonus features for paying members.

This makes me sad. Last.fm was for years my favorite online radio service but somehow they missed to invent apps like spotify...

So, both last.fm and Pandora are unavailable in Europe (for zero price, I mean). Anybody knows alternatives ?

Not very polished but I hooked the last fm API up to a YouTube search... http://fmix.heroku.com

Enter a song for similar songs, an artist for that artist's popular tracks

Did you try spotify?

Also tehre are some other good radios/stations:

  https://ex.fm/
  http://www.earmilk.com/
  http://u2.fm/ (not sure why it's down atm?)
  http://grooveshark.com/

> http://u2.fm/ (not sure why it's down atm?)

You might be thinking of http://2u.fm.

oh damn.. i thought i first tried 2u.fm and it didn't work for me either.. anyway.. oops

fwiw, spotify is not available in all of europe either, e.g. not in czech republic, hungary, italy, poland, portugal, greece, estonia, slovakia, slovenia, latvia etc etc .

Try Deezer. It is available in all the countries you listed:

http://developers.deezer.com/guidelines/countries

Signup only with Facebook account. No thanks.

That's not true. You can choose to make an account or use your Facebook one.

Only FB is what I'm seeing: http://s11.postimage.org/dhgy3pnvn/deezer.png

Can't create an account with my own mail id.

It doesn't look like you tried very hard. I'm in the US so I cannot verify but there are mentions of Deezer accounts on the page. Either click the link to login with your Deezer account (there will be probably be a signup link nearby) or close the facebook box in front and click the signup link in the top right.

Do check the image I linked above. From my country, only FB signup is allowed. I clicked around all the buttons on their homepage, top, bottom, etc. Wikipedia seems to agree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deezer#Facebook

I guess it depends on a country-to-country basis.

EDIT: Deezer itself says only FB is the option: http://support.deezer.com/customer/portal/articles/138981-ho...

Right, i just looked..

On the mainpage it says rightbelow the big fat FB login button "you don't have facebook? Sign up here" which opens a sign up form for deezer

There is really only Grooveshark, all the others are crap since they assume that because you like a few songs by a particular artist then you like similar artists too -- or even other songs by that artist.

The annoying thing about that is that I tend to fall in love with a song either because its message resonates with me or because of the beat.

http://www.bloom.fm are a London startup that launched last week with a killer app. iPhone only for now but their stations are really strong and the app is well designed.

They had a Web App before (under a different name) and also dekstop clients. The team is made of amazing people.

I believe http://www.rdio.com/ is now available in Europe. They posted earlier this past Summer that they'd be launching across Europe "soon".

We are available in some, but not all, European countries.

I just found http://www.reverbnation.com a while ago. Not sure yet what it's worth, but I will give it a try.

Grooveshark is available in most European countries

Not in Germany, courtesy of GEMA of course (what else).

Hardly ever used the thing; still sorry to see it go.

good to know, was breaking my head to figure out why the auto-dj feature from musicBee was not working (it shuffles your mp3s and adds some recommended streams from last.fm). it will be hard to replace, I know spotify does something similar but not as well.

No shock really, they seem to have been completely stagnant for years now

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