Last FM

1. About ‘Last FM’
Overview:  Music discovery servicethat givesyou personalised
recommendations based on the music you listen to.
 The area it focuses on is exhibition.
 The site is on the internet so can be accessed through its
own web page.
 CBS Interactive owns Last FM. CBS Interactive is owned
by CBS Corporation, who is owned by National
Amusements.
 It was last reported that there were 40 million scrobblers.
How has it
developed?
 Last Fm was founded and went live in 2002 by Felix
Miller, Martin Stiksel, Michael Breidenbruecker and
Thomas Willomitzer, all of them from Germany or
Austria.
 It originally had a very niche collection of
personalisation techniques; such as the "love" and
"ban" buttons allowed users to
gradually customize their profiles.
 Since then they have announced many redesigns of
the site to make it moer user friendly and in January
2014, the website announced on-demand integration
with Spotify and a new YouTube-powered radio
player.
 Upon the introduction of the YouTube player, the
standard radio service became a subscriber-only
feature.
 On 26 March 2014, Last.fm announced they would be
discontinuing their streaming radio service on 28 April
2014. In a statement, the site said the decision was
made in order to "focus on improving scrobbling and
recommendations".
 There is also an improvement of speed and less

2. irritating buffering.
What impact has it
had on the music
industry?
 Audiences can create their own accounts and have
access to make their own profile; recommendations;
they can create groups with other people with similar
music interests; and allows themaccess to see music
events which are on in their local area.
 Artists on the webpage can see how many scrobblers
have listened to their music, meaning that they can gain
audience feedback on which songs are most popular.
 Independent record labels and unsigned singers are
encouraged to promote their music on Last FM because
users will be recommended artists whoare a similar
genre to who they already listen to, meaning that this
could increase the popularity of particular artists.
Application of
theory?
 The site 'Last fm' does cohere with David Gauntlett's
theory on Web 2.0 as he said the we are become like
the creators of our own enjoyment and experience
and this site allows that by adding features to your
personal profile to never allow certain songs to ever
appear but also for less popular or up-and-coming
artists to be recognized and exhibited.
 In the same breath it doesn't allow much creativity in
the editing of the actual site and what music is on the
site as you cannot add music that's not already on
there. This also referred to the 'long tail' theory by Chris
Anderson because it has many more niche artists but
they don't have to be stocked in for sale and
purchase so they won’t lose money by adding the less
popular site.
 As for Technological determinism it is changing the
way we find music as we used to find out about
bands through gigs’ word of mouth, posters, and the
radio; but now we can look up an genre and find
almost all of the producing artists with a heavenly
easy click of a mouse. Using the idea of 'tags' you can
narrow down your search with stubborn ease to the
exact type of music you are in the mood for. This site
has made finding/ consuming music a hell of a lot
easier.

3. Prediction for
future
developments?
 In March 2009, it was claimed that were over 30 million
active users. However, most recently it was reported that
there were40 million users. Therefore, we can expect
that there will be an increase of the amount of users of
Last FM in the next few years.
 There is now more competition fromsimilar sites, and Last
FM recently asked subscribers to pay a monthly fee of $3
a month, which resulted in negativity towardsthe site
and a large loss of users. Therefore, wecould also argue
that there could be a loss of users due to the uprising
amount of alternative websites which allow you to
subscribe for free.