Last.fm taking major step towards becoming great big clever iTunes in the sky
I just spent 10mins fiddling with the beta-test of the new Last.fm (you’ll need to be a subscriber to Last.fm to have a play - if you aren’t, come back later, I’ll update this post with some screenshots later today).
I have to say, though their iconic design is gone (looking kinda Facebook-y now!), some of the customisation options are gone (for now), such as sliders to increase the obscurity/randomness of new bands it thinks you’ll like (if you’re feeling adventurous), this overall looks very promising and paints quite a clear picture for the future direction Last.fm is expected to take.
The salient ‘new’ feature is the Library. I say ‘new’; the current iteration of Last.fm has largely the same functionality, but this redesign does it justice as an increasingly central feature of the service (whereas charts once were, as some people have complained). The Library, much like your iTunes, lists all songs you listen to, and your playlists.
The new design incorporates a CoverFlow-like display of albums, or artists, for example. Unlike iTunes, this isn’t a list of your mp3’s - it’s any song you have listened to (that get ‘scrobbled‘, in last.fm parlance). This is a strong acknowledgement of how music consumption is evolving: you could be listening to your CDs, it might be an mp3 your friend emails you, it could be your mp3 library on your network hard-disk (NAS), or it could be a song streamed on last.fm, hypem, or whatever other streaming services Last.fm chooses to scrobble; might even be streamed through your shiny new 3G
iPhone.
Last.fm is building a very impressive online library of songs available for streaming; so even if the song I listen to is off a CD, it gets listed in my Last.fm library, and chances are, I can just click a link from there and listen to it whenever I damn well please - CD or no CD. See what Last.fm is doing here? It’s moving our listening online; just like downloading a song from iTunes, I can add tracks or entire albums to my Last.fm library at the click of a button.
So far any song can be streamed free up to 3 times, but what if they charged users for adding albums to their library, but once it’s there, you can stream the album as many times as you like, on a similar fee basis to iTunes? Or can they really just rely on monetizing traffic through adverts and subscriber fees like the one I currently pay?
What we’d be seeing emerge in the former case is a really peculiar business model - you pay not to ‘own’ the music (as in, buying a cd or downloading the mp3) - you pay a lump sum royalty fee to be able to play it, and your Library is a collection of music you have paid to have access to - both a digital permissions locker and a great big (clever - recommending songs) jukebox in the sky.
What would be great in this hypothetical scenario would be if songs I scrobble from my CDs or mp3s or other streaming services were automatically added to my locker (as they are now), on the assumption that I have paid for them already, so Last.fm assumes I have permission to listen through them as well. Methinks this might be legally impossible. What I wouldn’t give to understand the licensing agreements Last.fm has with labels that allows them to stream me millions of songs on my command!
Related:
- Last.fm - at LAST, the Great Big Jukebox in the Sky is coming!
- I will almost certainly be a subscriber to that. I've wanted nothing more since the day I first streamed a track online. I would orgasm if: New bands started uploading their music to Last.fm as fast and frequently as MySpace (MySpace is actually more of a 'new music' source than Last.fm is at the moment - weird. I've been playing with Imeem too), I have a desktop client (even better: a Foobar/iTunes plugin) to access this Great Big Jukebox in the Sky, and This desktop client integrates HypeMachine (I wouldn't be totally surprised, and am secretely hoping, that CBS buys HypeMachine sooner rather than later), like Mozilla Songbird has done very successfully (image above: a screenshot of their subscribe page which I just stumbled upon, though I'm already a subscriber)...
- What’s to come: the future of social media consumption
- With broadband penetration (and capacity) increasing, and music devices increasingly connected to WiFi (iPod Touch, iPhone) or to 3G (Nokia's big music push; laptops), the general consensus is that the future lies in media streaming, not the traditional stored music collections (be it shelves of LPs, stacks of CDs and DVDs, or hard drives full of mp3s and DiVX). A few years from now, you and all your friends will be consuming music online, on demand, from a myriad of different sources. If you use Mozilla Songbird, you can already pull in all the music posted on music blogs and Hype Machine into an iTunes-like virtual music library. Even more than infinite diversity of on demand music, the killer app for free (probably ad-supported) streaming media is that anyone can access it from anywhere in the world - they just need a link to it (unlike the mp3's on your iPod). That's the simple little thing that suggests we're in for a REVOLUTION in the way we consume and discover music. The logic is simple: Someone will setup a service which, when you stream music or a video anywhere on the web, will alert all your friends (that have signed...
- Has Elvis Costello inadvertently stumbled on the future direction of physical media retailing?
- News comes via Stereogum that Elvis Costello's new release will be the latest in a line of retail/marketing experiments from music artists rich enough to take the hit if it bombs (or music pirates run away with their product without so much as a 'thank you'). And, of course, experiments by those not rich enough to take the hit. Costello's wacky experiment will sell you a digital download code for his album, and then post you the package - WITHOUT the CD (presumably, you download it and burn it yourself). At first glance this seems like a pretty lame attempt to appeal to the digerati and be more contemporary. Wow, whoopee shit, he trusts people enough to let them burn their own CDs. Thanks Elvis! I never burned a CD before you allowed me to! [/sarcasm] But there's a lot more to it than that. Firstly, it acknowledges that now, digital > physical. The mp3 will get more plays than the CD. So save people the difficulty of ripping their CD, directly sell them the mp3 - but they've bought the whole album, not just their two favourite singles, and part of the value-added of an album is the physical...
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