Last.fm, a better way to discover?
Last.fm, which bills itself as “a music service that learns what you love,” is available as a Mac client, web client and iPhone app. It promises to change how people interact with and discover new music. But how does it stack up in real world usage?
Given that I own, as in bought and paid for, hundreds of LPs, tapes, CDs and digital albums, the notion that a free algorithm + a suite of go anywhere tools could show me new ways to enjoy and expand upon what I’ve already got is pretty intriguing.
Well, like a lot of folks with big collections, my music collection is stored on an external drive and Last.fm won’t “scrobble” (ie discover + correlate) music from that source, which defeats one of my original reasons for trying it.
Also, it doesn’t scrobble most of the internet radio stations I tune into via iTunes and doesn’t recognize stations played on AOLRadio at all. Given that at least half of the time I spend enjoying music is spent listening to web radio, that’s a big deal.
Further, when I start a new radio station (ie give Last.fm a starting point and it seeks out related music), it seems that Last.fm is trying to push whoever is on tour or has a new album rather than the kinds of music I’ve been loving/playlisting.
“New” is nice, but as Harry Truman famously said, “The only thing new in this world is the history that you don’t know,” and history in the music biz is all about back catalog and I’m not feeling that love in Last.fm.
Something good? The new music that Last.fm helps you find can be purchased from the iTunes Store (and often AmazonMP3, too), which is a brilliant and easy way to extend your library. Moreover, this is a feature that works pretty much equally well in the Mac client, browser client or on your iPhone.
Still, in general, Last.fm’s three available interfaces have more differences than shared design or user experience. For example, clicking the “heart” (love) button in the stand-alone client results in a pointless “Are you sure?” prompt. However, when using the iPhone app, where it’s super easy to make input missteps, there is no such prompt.
Yes, there are a handful consistent icons used, but interface element placement is all over the place and each interface uses a very different lexicon. Confusing.
One of new and neat features of Last.fm is LyricFind integration, which supplies lyrics for a range of mainstream artists. However, this feature is currently only available via the web client and, again, only covers a relative handful of mainstream (ie major label) artists and acts.
Conclusions
I love the idea of Last.fm, but it needs to learn to be more Mac like—promise less, but richly deliver advertised features—an idea that’s easy to say, but devilishly hard to achieve.
Still, I’m going to keep using Last.fm, but probably only on my iPod touch in the 15 minutes of twilight before I sleep. That is, it’s worth keeping an eye on how things develop, but Last.fm isn’t a fully developed tool, at least not yet.
What’s your take?
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October 14th, 2008
i’ve used lastfm for a while now
really the only thing i’ve had to do to find new music is scrobble my itunes to my last.fm account, and look at the recommended artists. it’s helped me find at least 12 new AMAZING bands
i honestly can’t argue with the points that you brought up…but i can say that it does do the one thing that you first mentioned…help you find new artists