The Wonders of Last.fm!

Last.fm is a website that I have been using for about two years now and it's utterly fantastic!

If you're a big music fan, keen in finding new artists and going to gigs then it's in invaluable tool, so I thought it was about time I spread the love, as I haven't seen any hubs on it as of yet!

History

Today's Last.fm came to be by the merging of two independent sources during 2005. The first was a plug-in designed for a computer science project knows as "Audioscrobbler" designed by Richard Jones of the University of Southampton.

The second was the last.fm website, founded by Felix Miller, Michael Breidenbruecker, Martin Stiksel and Thomas Willomitzer during 2002. This website functioned as an internet radio station and community for music lovers.

Both technologies used similar profiling to generate dynamic play-lists based on the user's feedback. For instance, the later utilised "love" and "ban" buttons (which are still used today) to allow users to specify whether or not they wanted to here tracks again.

As mentioned, these two aspects where merged in 2005 and this marked an important time in the companies history as it allowed information to be drawn from both the Audioscrobbler plug-in and the Last.fm stations - making it a very powerful tool.

To further integrate their work, both teams moved to new offices based in London and during the summer of 2005 the Audioscrobbler's domain was merged wholly into the Last.fm website.

As it stands Audioscrobbler.net is now a separate website, focused on technological developments, which is open to user additions.

The next fundamental landmark for Last came during July 2006 when the site was dramatically overhauled and the Last.fm software application was introduced. This software now controls all of the users playing information, known as "scrobbles".

The main improvement to the site was the "Dashboard", which is a personalised page which allows users to see their musical, video and gig recommendations, see what their friends and neighbours are listing too and all other activity.

With an ever increasing user-base and around 10 million tracks being scrobbled each day, interest in the website was increasing. This resulted in another major point in the company's history, as during May 2007 Last.fm was purchased for £140m by the American TV and Music Company CBS.

Backing from such a large corporation and signings by further companies led to further updates, notably the ability to purchase .mp3 tracks directly off the website. Furthermore, this backing should ensure that Last.fm continues to evolve with user requirements and the ever changing internet multimedia business.

What it does & how it does it

Last.fm uses the software to retrieve playing data (scrobbles) from numerous supported players and then sends this to the user's personal profile. When playing a song, a small artist bio shows up in the software, which can be followed to the website.

Artist pages are automatically generated when a user plays them for the first time; from then on in they are updated automatically as users continue to listen to them. On each artist page the user is given a wealth of options, the most useful of which is probably the "similar artists" section, which, as the name suggests is a list of artists that the user may also like.

Last.fm's recommendations system is a big aspect of the site as it allows users to discover new bands, introduce others to bands, find out about local gigs and view videos by bands they may like.

This is achieved using a collaborative filtering algorithm, which basically bases its assumptions and consequent recommendations on the profiles of users with similar tastes, picking out artists that appear on such profiles but not their own.

This all sounds quite complex, and isn't required knowledge to use the site. In fact, all new users need to do is create a profile, (for free!), download the software and start listening to music. After the first week the users "charts" will start to compile, which are broken down into weekly and then monthly, bi-annually or annually.

At first recommendations may leave a little to be desired, but once last starts to get a good idea of your musical taste it will start returning more favourable artists and gigs.

... Watch this space - more to come!