Last.fm is ending their streaming radio service in April | Hacker News Reader

Last.fm is ending their streaming radio service in April

last.fm

141 pointsdmix98 comments

I am more disappointed by the comments than the announcement itself. The first few comments seem to be blaming last.fm for 'giving up' without actually trying to understand why they made those (extremely) difficult choices.

The music publishing and licensing industry (vastly different from the actual creators, mind you) isn't as straightforward as people believe it to be. Music licenses are extremely tricky and (often) subject to the whims of the publishing labels.

There is no standard rate for a licensing specific tracks (or set of tracks) and the licenses that are available in the market are either too broad and expensive or too narrow and useless.

The entertainment industry in general is a mess - nobody knows how to handle the internet as a viable platform and nobody is willing to risk their profits to attempt and make mistakes either. They are trying to force an outdated method built for a one-way channel (needle-hour plays) on a platform that primarily believes in two-way interactivity.

In other words, they are trying to license content by syndication in a world where RSS, APIs and interactive conversations are the norm - not only is it a ridiculously laughable concept, but it goes against the very grain of the entire thing.

The whole entertainment publishing and licensing industry is in dire need of an overhaul. Unfortunately, the question everyone is too busy asking, is the question everyone should be trying to answer together: "Who will bell the cat?"

We were working towards a grassroots licensing platform on my last company, Musio. We actually had really great traction and progress, including the ear of a lot of publishers and artists. The CEO was really involved in the music scene and had an incredible ear for the market. Unfortunately a bad initial structure and a few blowhard members of the board essentially stonewalled any funding for the company and we had to shut down. If it sounds insane that an investor would sooner take a 100% loss (and force a loss on the other investors) than restructure the company, that's because it is. Oh well.

The decisions people make are generally completely rational from their viewpoint. To you their decisions may seem insane, but perhaps they also have a stake in the current system and all of the proposed options would hurt them more in that arena than the possible or probable benefits in the area you're looking at.

As much as I wish you were right about our situation, you aren't. We looked for meaning and reasons inside and out. There were none.

It was actually just one asshole who couldn't admit he was wrong. He even told as much at one point towards the end, that he would sooner lose everything he invested than backpedal on his initial decisions.

Just a jackass with too much money.

Yep, a jackass who'd rather lose money than face. It's a value decision that we may not agree with in this case, but it's a legitimate value decision for him.

I'd regard this as having three areas you'd "score" to decide: Financial impact on me, Personal impact on me (including reputation), impact on others. If "impact on others" is a non-issue for you and the personal financial impact isn't much compared to your personal wealth, you could easily make your decision on something like this based entirely on ego.

Not caring about the impact on others may be a bit sociopathic, but there's nothing criminal about that and in fact there are quite a few very successful CEOs and financiers who just don't give a rat's ass about the little people.

The Music and Video game industries are already "fixed". The web is bursting with quality independent content that is either Free, free or priced well and delivered without DRM. The choice is already there, it's no ones fault but your own if the only content you care about is the stuff pushed by these toxic companies.

Your comment does seem to apply to the TV and Film industry though. An indie film equivalent of Bandcamp would be great. Bollocks to the current movement with their film festivals and limited screenings, at least make a fucking effort to be accessible.

Would you provide links? I would be interested in them.

Is there something specific you would like me to link? I'm really not exaggerating when I say the web is overflowing with this content. I could link some of the "big" names, but for every one there are dozens or hundreds of similar sites. It's never-ending, especially since almost every indie artist/dev promotes other indies.

https://bandcamp.com/

http://www.jamendo.com/

https://soundcloud.com/

http://freemusicarchive.org/

http://itch.io/

http://www.gog.com/

https://www.humblebundle.com/

http://www.indieroyale.com/

https://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page

Don't forget http://www.ektoplazm.com/ . Completely free music, mostly psytrance and dance, 100s of cds worth, you can't even buy it if you wanted. Lots of it is very good. The business model for artists seems to be to release free music and get yourself promoted enough that you get invited to DJ at electronic music festivals. The record sales are total peanuts so why even bother. The site crowdfunds redesigns and such but mostly people work on it because they really like the music.

Don't forget http://grooveshark.com

Don't even need to restrict yourself to indie. I've got a Spotify Premium account that my wife sometimes hijacks to listen to at her business. Since you can only listen on one mobile device at a time, I'll just hop on Grooveshark if she stole Spotify. I've never not been able to find what I was looking for on Spotify on Grooveshark, and often it has songs in the catalog that Spotify does not.

Beyond the other links, alt-music is out there and can be very good. E.g. http://www.ocremix.org/ (which makes free remixes of video game music, often in ways that add a ton of musical value above and beyond the track being covered).

Isn't Vimeo On Demand (https://vimeo.com/ondemand) the indie film equivalent of Bandcamp?

Yeah.. It's a step in the right direction but a little too close to the existing model for my tastes. Exposing independent films is great, but it's still shit if you aren't going to make an effort to move away from the "Hollywood model".

There are regional restrictions, just like every other streaming service. If you are already in a "blessed region", you already have access to all the other services.

There is still the concept of renting, which is just another way of saying "DRM". You can "rent", but by doing so you are limited to viewing it in the way they dictate and for only a limited time. What's worse, some films only give you this option.

For me, that's sort of missing the entire point.

Absolutely, in addition to independent artists and bands found on Bandcamp & Co. it's also very easy to buy DRM-free lossless music by signed and more popular artists. Boomkat, Qobuz, HDTracks, you name it. These days I really can't complain about quality music buying and streaming options.

With movies and TV on the other hand, you're right as well. It's a mess - even more so as a non-american. Even independent creators are doing it wrong: Tried buying the movie/documentary Teenage the other day - no download/buy option, instead screening in a handful of US cities. Good luck getting my money with that approach.

However there are also good examples like Computer Chess or Sleepwalk With Me, which let you buy a DRM-free download.

The thing is, Last.fm started on the premise of changing all that. That was their stated goal, their reason for existing.

Last.fm promised to be a service not simply for listening to music, but for people who love music, and openly critical of the state of the music industry.

Of course all of that changed when they sold to CBS. After that, nothing else seemed to matter but selling subscriptions to the radio service whilst playing nice with the industry. A service which also stopped evolving, and had it's lunch easily eaten by Spotify. Which has to deal with the same licensing mess, but for some reason was already doing a better job when they were still a small startup.

Last.fm gave up a long time ago. And now that Spotify seems to be getting a grip on the recommendations, I don't see Last.fm having any future whatsoever.

Seconded! Everything about Last.fm started to detereorate from the moment they were bought by CBS. One thing in particular was baffling to me. It seemed like they deliberately tried to deemphasize the community aspects of the site. The weekly computed list of musical neighbours which used to be a great source for music discovery, got burried. Related journals and groups disappeared from artist and tag pages. In short everything that made me want to engage with other users. As a consequence, I began to visit the site less and less frequently. Because after all there is a limit to how interesting it is to look at compiled statistics about the music you listen to.

thirded. the entire point was social listening. even when I didn't like what a friend was into, it was interesting to laugh at the differences in taste.

If last.fm disappoints you, consider helping GNU FM by improving the software, using http://libre.fm, or starting up your own GNU FM server.

Libre.fm is the main instance of the GNU FM software. GNU FM is compatible with the audioscrobbler API and supports streaming. Additionally, you can mirror your scrobbles from GNU FM to last.fm if you want. Libre.fm is a great if you want to check out some free culture music.

I guess it can only stream libre music though ?

I can't imagine how it could stream music from artists I already know..

It is the policy of libre.fm to only host free culture music, but that doesn't mean that you (or another motivated person) could take GNU FM and start up a service that streams music that's licensed differently. Provided that you have the right to do so, of course.

Unfortunately (from the perspective of a songwriter), a lot of people will take that as wink-wink nudge-nudge. Anyway, a non-profit streaming service that is voluntarily populated only by indie artists that control their own licensing terms (in exchange for revenue share) would a good thing.

A perfectly legal non-wink wink nudge nudge would appear to be private-ish streaming with music from magnatune:

http://magnatune.com/info/give

So letting the whole world listen would break the agreement, but just streaming to you, your spouse, and maybe a buddy or two would be "OK" or at least well within the spirit of the agreement. Just no more than 3 other people. I'm not exactly sure why you'd stream rather than just share the file, but whatever. Maybe you have purchased gigs and gigs of music licenses and want a jukebox effect, donno.

I've purchased rights from magnatune in the distant past, and would recommend them. I like their business model and they did the deal professionally and quickly, and I've not heard anyone complain about them. Good people, basically.

Or by using subsonic - which is a pretty sexy host-it-yourself web jukebox (OSS): http://www.subsonic.org

What is "wink-wink nudge-nudge"? Do you think I'm promoting violating licenses?

I'm a musician, too. I meant that someone could start a GNU FM service and stream music that has been licensed legally from musicians.

pertinent http://youtu.be/ona-RhLfRfc

I'd love to do more to disassociate the two.

Libre.fm is five years old now. Time for us to break the chain?

Well, for one it could possibly stream stuff in the public domain.

But yes, there is a good use case for someone creating a popular GNU FM site that plays music that's not under a free license.

Didn't Twitter just shut down their site that did just that?

Interesting...where are the docs that explain how to do this mirroring? Can't see anything obvious on the site.

From your profile... click 'Connections to other services'

http://i.imgur.com/S8DVnZg.png

https://gitorious.org/foocorp/gnu-fm/source/3f2cfbb47959c7a9... is the code that does it.

I've been scrobbling for many years, and marking tracks as "loved", but never used the radio itself. I used the recommendations for new music and events, and now I use Spotify for listening music, and the last.fm app inside Spotify to discover new music. It works pretty well for me.

Well, that sucks! I've discovered so many awesome bands and great songs over the years from Last.fm's streaming service, including a lot of underground stuff I wouldn't expect a site like that to have. I always wondered how they managed to keep the doors open without a paid service. Guess they cant =/.

Try grooveshark, they also "similar artists". It's less precise - it shows artists which are quite different (but I can imagine people listening to them both) but that may be an advantage you get a wider set of bands

Forgot about them, thanks for the tip.

This is an interesting problem. I want to discover new music, but not at random. However, being offered a whole lot of "sounds just like" music tends to reinforce a local maxima (so to speak).

What I want are people with taste kinda-sorta like mine to tell me, Hey check this is out, and pass me something not like everything else I listen to, yet somehow in the realm of stuff I might probably like.

I had a similar problem and Grooveshark helped me (But they now removed that feature, I've complained but they don't care.)

My hack was to search for playlists containing a song I liked. So I would find a "rock" playlist with lots of songs I knew but a couple very good ones I didn't.

As a startup idea, I was thinking of a "Github for playlist". Basically, abstracting the different "streaming" services and really focus on the quality of the playlist.

Anyone could fork your playlist, add a few songs, and do a "pull request". The cool thing is how I could be subscribed to your playlist and since I trust your taste, I would get notifications when you add or accept new songs.

I see some kind of hierarchy where there could be "stable" playlist that are updated conservatively but also other "unstable" playlists where it changes often so you can discover more song.

That would definitely be a service I would use by following other good playlists but also curating mine and welcoming suggestions from friends.

Basically, abstracting the different "streaming" services and really focus on the quality of the playlist.

bop.fm of YC S13 is doing exactly that. Their UI is way too clunky for me to think about using it yet, but the idea is solid

Hey, I've just tried it, that's great. As you said, UI is very clunky but I managed to explore and listen to new songs based on songs I already liked thanks to the playlist of other users.

Hey, Grooveshark dev here...neither I or a couple other devs I just asked can think of a feature that we removed related to radio. Can you give some clarification?

Hey, I'm not sure what you mean by the radio.

But all I want is to view playlists containing a song I like.

So, let's say I search for "One Metallica". I'd like a button "Playlists containing this song" that would let me browse playlists of everyone who has "One of Metallica" in it.

And, if I may suggest a new functionality, what would be even better is to find playlists containing multiple songs.. So, "Please show me some playlists containing the song One Metallica and Pull Me Under of Dream Theater". I'm confident that these playlists will contain songs I like.

Personally I preferred that way to explore new songs instead of the radio thing.

Oh I see what you're saying now...to my knowledge we never had a feature like that, unfortunately I think it would be fairly expensive to implement the way our data is structured right now (it's optimized for looking up playlist -> songs not the other way around), but I can definitely see the appeal of a feature like that. I could see us precomputing a list of playlists to check out per song and applying some quality metrics to them...precomputing would preclude us from being able to do looking up playlists by multiple songs. Anyway I will mention it to my boss, can't make any promises of course.

Talking about the way Grooveshark structure their data could be an interesting topic.

I would be surprised to test how much time it would take to find some playlists containing a song even with a trivial algorithm. The reason I'm saying that is that it would be very fast for popular songs to find a few playlists (We don't need 1000 results, just a few is great for our case). And for the less known songs, I'm happy to wait for quality playlists! ;)

That's why I really liked direct connect, I would spend days going through people's share lists even after I downloaded the album I originally wanted, because they had so much more cool stuff

I have a similar problem with Spotify: it often happens that I like a certain song by a certain artist, but that song is usually unlike the rest of the album. Therefore, recommendations always fall in "you like this album/artist, this one is similar", which is clearly not what I want.

In theory Pandora can solve that problem, but for reasons I don't know even their list-similar-songs-service is blocked outside the US (it used to be that you could use that one alone in a separate page, but then they blocked it).

Have you tried Slacker? You can adjust artist/album/song stations[1], there are staff-curated stations, and you can filter stations by mood. Three user tiers ranging from free to $10 monthly.

They won my affection when they made a station devoted to the music of Breaking Bad to celebrate the start of the final season.

[1] http://imgur.com/hFap7MM

Hmm, Grooveshark seems blocked here (Denmark). Is it blocked everywhere outside the U.S., or specifically here?

When I go, I get a message saying: Som følge af høje driftsomkostninger, har amerikansk baserede Grooveshark stoppet [blokeret for] adgang fra Danmark. Vi vil savne dig! Du er velkommen til at skrive til os. Vi kommer tilbage!

Roughly: Due to high operating expenses, the American-based Grooveshark has stopped [blocked] access from Denmark. We will miss you! You are welcome to write to us. We'll be back!

I know rdio works in denmark, though they are currently in the process of switching their music recommendation engine from echo nest. The UI is also beautiful

Grooveshark is available in every country other than Germany and Denmark.

They've had a paid service for quite a while, but apparently $3/month + ads just isn't enough.

They did have a paid service, I was a paying subscriber for a few years. But they never managed to figuring out licensing for play-on-demand, and they were late to market with mobile apps. Once Rdio came to Australia I started paying 4x as much as I paid Last.FM, and dropped my Last.FM subscription.

You can still get a playlist of recommended music on the web at www.last.fm/listen/user/USERNAME/recommended

It uses embedded YouTube videos, but it's nice to use it on some occasions.

Was being acquired by CBS the deathblow to Last.fm? It seems they easily could have been the social network for music, but they never really innovated beyond their streaming radio and scrobbler products.

Probably not. CBS was very hands-off with Last.fm, with at least their "Interactive" division having basically no communication with Last.fm (that I know of).

Last.fm's social interaction was pretty poor, and their device support for radio/scrobbling was weak. The only thing I ever used Last.fm for was the streaming radio, which was amazingly relevant and full of bands I hadn't heard of. Sad day :(

Interesting quote: "CBS has guaranteed to continue to back Last.fm for "at least" 12 months from the date of approval of its financial results, which were signed off on 25 November."[1]

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/13/last-fm-loses-4...

So everything will probably be decided in November 2014.

I find it strange how slow Last.fm is to do anything. I've been a user for 9 years, and almost nothing has changed in that time. You're lucky if you get one minor feature update in a year - they seem to be incredibly slow moving.

That being said, I'd be very sad if they closed, though I assume a competitor which could import your Last.fm history would spring up very quickly for those who only want the data history and not streaming.

Here is the best link to transfer you data from Last.fm to Libre.fm: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/easily-export-you-last-fm...

See that they say that the scrobbling service will still work. No FUD here, but since some applications allow multi-scrobbling now, it is just a tip.

If Spotify can sell unlimited streaming for $9/m why can't last.fm? I'd rather pay $9 (or more) to last.fm for the same streaming service along with scrobbing and their much better discovery engine.

I think it's because Spotify is debt-financed and can't actually afford to sell unlimited streaming for $9/m, even though they're doing it. It leads to listeners feeling entitled to their streaming, and seeing music publishers (which are often the songwriters themselves) as the bad guys for not accepting lower royalties.

Is this pretty much the end of last.fm, will they be able to keep paying subscribers without streaming radio?

This is very sad - I don't know how else to listen to a mix of music I like along with new music throughout the day.

Do you know Pandora? If you can't access the site, you could use a browser extension called "MediaHint". There's also http://rd.io/.

And spotify, etc, etc, etc

I'm not sure that pandora is available in the UK ?

I tried it when it started and wasn't so keen on the recommendations... might try rd.io

i thoroughly enjoy 8tracks.com

I've found Rdio to be the best service for this, especially for new music discovery.

I'm a bit worried now that they're switching from Echo Nest though

Just use Spotify, choose an artist you like and generate a radio station from them. Then it'll play you new related artists, and the original one you chose.

AFAIK, Last.fm has the largest library and listening data on the Internet. However the only remarkable feature that they offer was the radio and they will end it. They couldn't use that power in order to create a paid music streaming service like Spotify or Rdio. I really wonder why they didn't even try it.

I agree it is a bit mind-boggling, they have the users who love their service. I love having my history there and they are the only ones other than iTunes that know so much about my music tastes.

Bands have even got big on last.fm, MGMT pretty much hit it big on there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGMT

I think theres a good opportunity here for people considering getting into the streaming space. For example, SoundCloud and Youtube allow you to access streams without tying yourself in with DRM. Artists want to be heard and fans want to be able to access that content easily. With services out there being really good for publishing music, a streaming service that allows an artist to directly engage their fans would be really interesting.

The challenge is creating a community for both the musicians and fans to interact meaningfully. Musicians want to be free from being lumped in with the noise and fans want to be explore that content freely. I think for most streaming services out there, this hasn't really been totally figured out, although Spotify and SoundCloud are trying to.

That's far from an original thought :)

Problem is, it's like a pot of gold in the middle of a minefield. No one seems to be able to put the whole puzzle together in a way that pleases all the stakeholders. Just the other day, Twitter bowed out of the space, as well.

Last.fm had a huge library of music, about 100 times more variety than Pandora has. I discovered tons and tons of bands, that are obscure in other countries.

This is a huge blow to my listening experience and I'm sure will hurt a lot of obscure bands from being discovered.

Consider vk.com :)

At least scrobbling will still be around.

Why is that good?

On my end? Because I've logged 162,000 tracks since 2004/01/14, and would like to keep building this database for as long as possible.

Edit: Approximately 11,000 hours worth of listening time has been kept track of for me thanks to last.fm. About 12% of my life-hours since 2004/01/14 are accounted for in my last.fm data.

Please consider backing up your data.

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/3080/how-can-i-ex...

Also, my project GNU FM (running at Libre.fm, amongst others) can give you a local or private scrobble server that can also talk to Last.fm for you. Indeed, we have federated Last.fm as part of the GNU FM network of federated scrobblers.

The link to GNU FM at the bottom of libre.fm leads to a 404: http://foocorp.org/projects/fm/

Damn. We're moving stuff around between our boxes at the Internet Archive and our boxes in the UK.

I'll get that fixed.

> Also, my project GNU FM (running at Libre.fm, amongst others) can give you a local or private scrobble server that can also talk to Last.fm for you. Indeed, we have federated Last.fm as part of the GNU FM network of federated scrobblers.

Is there a way to automatically publish stats from mpd to GnuFM?

If so, I'd love to use this - I mostly listen to music via mpd (ncmpcpp).

Absolutely.

http://bugs.foocorp.net/projects/librefm/wiki/Clientsmpd has some instructions. Let me know if they don't work for you and I'll see if I can figure out the next steps.

Fully agree. I'll repost what I said in a previous last.fm discussion.

> I treasure my last.fm stats so much. It has documented 9 years of my life in a way that no other site or social network could express.

Scrobbling was the original focus of last.fm (when it was actually called AudioScrobbler). You would listen to your own music and it would run in the background keeping track of what you played, such that you could see your stats and discover other similar music.

AudioScrobbler and Last.FM were originally separate concerns that came together. (I wrote the first Windows Media Player AudioScrobbler plugin back in '02 or '03 but lost interest. One of my poorer decisions!)

I was using Last.FM the other day and it looks like they were showing off a player that was in Beta. That player was basically just loading YouTube videos. Is this going to go away as well?

too bad. last.fm is a great service, and their radio was often better than the equivalent service on pandora/spotify.

guess its time to go back to grooveshark. i've heard it is fantastic lately.

This is bittersweet for me, because I loved their streaming services. I'm happy that there are so many (non-Pandora) alternatives now to last.fm streaming, and I'm happy they're keeping their core scrobbling/discovery functionality intact, but it's disappointing that there have been so many obstacles for this company to provide all of its excellent services up to this point. I hope this one day will change.

Music industry is screwed in that sense and that's understandable move from LastFM's side.

What I cannot understand from LastFM team is why are they loosing the "Music Events" market (basically, making mobile app easier to discover / add them). I think they could make a huge success in that sense to keep up.

I've been on the alternative last.fm beta streaming player for a while. The alternative is using their recommendations and scrobbler for youtube hosted content. This version is not shutting down. It could use a little curation, but overall I haven't minded the switch so much.

After TT, this sort of shakeout is unsurprising.

Pandora and Spotify are ripe for moves. And Rdio possibly.

Anyone here that knows a way to export all (my) scrobbles?

Not exactly what you asked for but I spent about 5 minutes searching.

1. I navigated to http://last.fm/api

2. I immediately found http://www.last.fm/api/feeds

3. From there I found http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/CGamesPlay/recenttrack...

4. I guessed, and found http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/CGamesPlay/recenttrack...

5. The documentation on http://www.last.fm/api/show/user.getRecentTracks includes info on how to fetch scrobbles during a given time period.

I never used it for anything other than scrobbling anyway.

If you're just in it for the scrobbling, you might like GNU FM -- run your own scrobbling server in private.

I think this has something to do with Spotify acquiring Echonest; I believe Echonest powered Last.fm's recommendation and radio functionality.

Consumer services never live on w/o revenue.

which means 8tracks won't work? They have to close it down? Because the last time I checked, 8tracks used last.fm to stream music and had limitations like skipping tracks.

I loved last.fm back in the day but cancelled my account after CBS bought them.

I have had faith in Last.fm when they started, thinking they gonna change the music industry quite a bit. It seems they could not achieve that, but there is a great progress, there are so many music producers preferring the social music sites to distribute their work that sooner or later the music industry we know is going to be dead.

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