So farewell then, last.fm radio. I used to be a big fan and contributed code to make it possible to stream the radio into winamp. But using the radio though the API was dropped a few years ago and I always disliked the official player so I havent used it in quite a while. I even had a subscription once making last.fm one of the very, very few things on the internet Ive ever paid for. And way back when they operated out of a loft above a Whitechapel sweat shop and lived in tents on the roof, I even went for an interview for CTO. Ive now got 112492 plays since I joined in 4 Apr 2004 (just coming up on 10 years). So I take last.fms life and future a bit personally. Im sure Ill go on using the unofficial scrobbler for winamp and will still use last.fm for music discovery but even there, discogs is generally more useful these days. There is huge value in the audience generated wiki-style tags, artist descriptions, scrobbling, events and so on, but other people now do each piece of the puzzle better. CBS doesnt appear to know what to do with the property. Perhaps like AOL and Winamp they should put it up for sale. I kind of wish CBS would sell last.fm to Google but they would probably kill it. If there is some kind of future, then last.fm should go out of its way to link to and partner with other services like Google Play, Discogs, Songkick and so on. But I suspect that just like AOL, Apple and a few others, corporate pride means theyre unable to work with others. Google play especially really should have an official scrobbler for all the different platforms where Google Play Music is available. last.fm/forum/21717/_/2226535/1 last.fm/user/jbond --- Changes to Subscriptions 26 March 2014 – Feedback and Ideas – Last.fm » The world’s largest online music catalogue, powered by your scrobbles. Free listening, videos, photos, stats, charts, biographies and concerts. dlvr.it/5FR00b
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:14:36 +0000