Information AboutLast.fm |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT LAST.FM | |
| 2002 establishments | |
| internet radio | |
| cbs corporation subsidiaries | |
| music websites | |
| online music and lyrics databases | |
| online social networking | |
| virtual communities | |
| web 2.0 | |
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Last.fm is an Internet Radio station and Music Recommendation System that merged with sister site '''Audioscrobbler''' in August 2005 . The system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a Collaborative Filter , or optionally, recorded by an Audioscrobbler Plugin installed into its users' Music Playing Application . FEATURES A Last.fm user can build up a musical profile using two methods: by listening to their personal music collection on a music player application with an Audioscrobbler Plugin , or by listening to the Last.fm Internet Radio service, usually with the Last.fm Player . Songs played are added to a Log from which personal top artist/track Bar Chart s and musical recommendations are Calculated . The user's page also displays Recently Played tracks, and these are available via Web Services , allowing users to display them on Blog s or as Forum signatures. Recommendations are calculated using a Collaborative Filtering Algorithm so users can browse a list of artists not listed on their own profile but that which appear on those of others with similar musical tastes. Last.fm also permits users to manually recommend specific artists, songs or albums to other users (as long as the recommendation in question is included in the last.fm database). Perhaps the most-used Community feature within Last.fm is the formation of user groups between users with something in common (for example, membership of another Internet Forum ). Last.fm will generate a group profile similar to the users' profiles, showing an amalgamated set of data and charting the group's overall tastes. Record labels and artists are encouraged to promote their music on Last.fm, because the filtering and recommendation features mean that the music will be played for users who already like similar artists. Last.fm music stock contains more than 100,000 songs. As with many music sites, 30-second previews of tracks are available on demand, but the intent is that the music will be played as users listen to appropriate stations. Paid accounts Last.fm offers paid accounts, costing $ 3 (or an equivalent Round sum of another currency) per month. Some of the extra features that paid users receive are:
Tags With the August 2005 relaunch, Last.fm supports end-user Tagging of artists, albums, and tracks to create a sitewide Folksonomy of music. Users can browse via tags, but the most important benefit is ''tag radio'', permitting users to play music that has been tagged a certain way. This tagging can be by genre ("garage rock"), mood ("chill"), artist characteristic ("baritone"), or any other form of user-defined classification ("singers Sarah would like"). Last.fm Player , tuned to a custom station playing songs that have been Tagged as "classical".]] Last.fm music is most commonly played using a custom player that must be downloaded and installed. The player displays the song title, album, and artist, along with album cover art when available. There are three buttons, allowing the user to ''love'', ''skip'', or ''ban'' a song. The ''love'' button adds the song to the user's ''loved tracks'' playlist; the ''ban'' button ensures that the song won't be played again. Both features affect the user's profile. The ''skip'' button does not. Other controls include volume, stop, and options. The player uses an MP3 stream encoded at 128 kbit/s 44.1 kHz. In the latest release of the Last.fm Player application, the user can select to use an external player. When this is done, the Last.fm Player provides the user with a local URL, through which the Last.fm music stream is proxied. Users can then open the URL in their preferred media player. Other players LastFMProxy Prior to script written by Vidar Madsen , allows users to use their own music player again, by connecting to Last.fm and relaying its stream to the user's player of choice. MyLastFM MyLastFM is an Open Source desktop client for the Windows platform which can play Last.fm streams or relay the streams to other music players (similar to LastFMProxy). Last Exit Last Exit is an open source GTK+ -based client similar to the official player. Audioscrobbler plugin Last.fm can optionally build a profile directly from a user's music played on their personal computer. Users must Download and install a Plugin for their music player, which will automatically submit the artist and title of the Song after either Half the song or the first four minutes have played, whichever comes first. When seek controls are used, the track is shorter than 30 seconds, or the track lacks Metadata ( ID3 , CDDB , etc), the track is not submitted. The Pony In December 2005 , Last.fm delivered a long-term promise to their users, and delivered their top secret "Pony" Page. The Pony page (available only to logged in users) allows an aggregated overview of all the user-centric data available from the service. The service uses the tag line "Last.fm uses its giant computer brain to find the latest and greatest things for you to listen, read, and even talk to, day in and day out." Other Other features include a profile editor (so users can remove tracks that have been submitted with incorrect metadata or add artists/tracks to tagsets en-masse), navigation to linked profiles (such as friends and musical neighbours) and a list of individual users' favourite albums. LAST.FM AS A GLOBAL CHART As a mass music Ranking system, Last.fm (through its overall "total played" table) has several advantages over traditional Music Chart s. While traditional music charts measure a song's success by the number of units sold and radio plays, Last.fm measures it by the number of people playing the song. There are, however, disadvantages to the use of Last.fm's overall charts as a definitive ranking:
''See: Last.fm Charts '' HISTORY AND MERGER Audioscrobbler began as a Computer Science project by Richard "RJ" Jones while at the University Of Southampton in the United Kingdom . RJ developed the first plugins, then opened an API to the community, after which many music players on different Operating System platforms were supported. Audioscrobbler was limited to recording music its users played on a registered computer, which allowed for charting and collaborative filtering. Last.fm was founded in 2002 by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, Michael Breidenbruecker and Thomas Willomitzer, all from Austria and Germany , as an internet radio station and music community site, using similar music profiles to generate dynamic playlists. The "love" and "ban" buttons allowed users to gradually customize their profiles. Last.fm won the Europrix 2002 and was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica in 2003 . The Audioscrobbler and Last.fm teams began to work closely together, both teams moving into the same offices in Whitechapel part of London , and by 2003 Last.fm was fully integrated with Audioscrobbler profiles. Input could come through an Audioscrobbler plugin or a Last.fm station. The sites also shared many community forums, although a few were unique to each site. On August 9 2005 , the old Audioscrobbler site at the audioscrobbler.com Domain Name was wholly merged into the new Last.fm site. On September 5 , 2005 , audioscrobbler.net was launched as a development-oriented site. PLUGINS Plugins are available for the following applications: {Link without Title}
All Audioscrobbler plugins are Open Source , and the listening data it collects is released every so often under a Creative Commons License . SEE ALSO
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