Sunday, October 5, 2008

LAST.FM - Bobby Lewis, Christina Linehan, Erica Longoria


“Last.fm is a music service that learns what you love...” 

Last.fm offers streaming music and allows users to create profiles which in turn serves as the essence of this site (a community contributing to the overall listening experience).  Listeners can contribute a variety of content (for example - uploading pictures of a recent concert they attended or a band bio) which makes the experience similar to that of Wikipedia or Myspace.

Choosing what to listen to is done with ease as users can simply click on an image of their favorite album, search for a favorite tune, and/or select from one of the “popular tags” (links provided for different genres). 
 
On the last.fm site, you actually as a listener play a very interactive role in the site. You can decide whether to ban certain tracks, share them with others, or save them for your own personal playlist. The ability to ban certain tracks on the internet radio gives you I think a fair amount of control of the music played. When you go to the radio portion of the site you can choose different genres to listen to and from there you can see similar artist and click to listen to another “station”.

The site easily makes money from their $3.00 a month subscription fee they charge if you sign up.  Signing up for this subscription actually gives you first priority to listening to the radio when the site gets jammed with visitors (during peak hours).  It also allows you to share music and recommend your playlist to other users, and use the site without any unwanted advertising. However, if you choose to go the unpaid route, you will see advertising for various products.

I found it interesting that most of the advertising I saw on the site was from AT&T products, including a lot of advertising on the IPhone.  This actually makes a lot of sense due to the fact that you can upload last.fm to your IPhone or media player.  Once you type in a certain artists it quickly pulls up their popular songs, making it easy for you to quickly purchase if you wanted.  So even though the site was designed around the free radio feature, you can tell how the website pays for the usage of the radio through not only advertising but subscribing.

Last.fm pretty much has whatever genre of music you are looking for. When you enter the site the top tool bar gives you a choice of music, videos, radio, events, charts, and a search bar.  If you want, you can just type and artists’ name or a song into the search bar and it will pull it up for you.  This site pretty much has whatever you can think of.  If you click on music, a side tool bar gives you different types of genres: blues, classical, country, punk, Latin, music by the decade (50’s, 60’s), etc.  There was one genre that I was a little unsure of what type of music it was going to be, so I clicked on it.  Last.fm kind of didn’t really know what “world” music was either.  On all the genres there is a link at the top that ask if you want to learn more about this type of music, and when you click on that it has a little wiki section that tells some extra info about that type of music.  But, on the world genre there was no wiki definition…however, if you feel you have insight on this “worldly” music feel free to add, it has a link for that too.  The link did say it was similar to hybrid, ethno, Asian, African types of music.

Last.fm offers a lot of artists.  I typed in various genres of music from various years and the search engine pulled up many tracks for every single artist. 

As well as tracks for that particular artist, it also gave you artist similar to that artist and pretty much every artist had a radio station. The few that did not have their own station where featured on another station that was provided for you.  It was pretty cool.  I didn’t really find any “celebrity play lists” but you can look at the charts on the artists you are listening to as well as how many people are listening at that exact moment and the average that the artist is listened to.  The site also offers the top artists of each particular genre when you open a certain genres page.  On the main page of the site it also shows you some of the most listened to artists.

I don’t really know if the cool features on this site are unique or not but last.fm has lots of cool features. One thing that I thought was pretty cool is on the main page. There are a few lines about how many people all over the world are listening to a certain band and like how many people are attending a certain concert and where.  The first time I logged on it was a concert in Austin and I thought that was cool.

There are a lot of really cool features about this site though.  One is that you can pretty much find whatever song you are looking for and you can find more songs by that artists and similar artists. You are able to view the actual albums as well as watch tons of music videos. You can also read biographies of artists, look at photos of them, view events, and read journals by them. The viewer is also given the opportunity to buy tracks and albums off Amazon and eBay or to download through iTunes, 7digital, and Amazon mp3.  The site is very user friendly which is really good for lots of people. I would have to say the best feature on the site is definitely the vast variety of music that is available for free.

6 comments:

Jcondit said...

Your group did great. I really like how your group set up your blog. The style and pictures and hyperlinks look great. Good job. Oh, and it was well researched as well.

Olga said...

Good job on the blog!I visited Last.FM and I found it very well organized and designed. I liked that site provides different genres and when you open one of them you can see the images of the performers who are the most popular. usually,I don't use radio web sites that much, but I really liked Last.FM and I think I will use it more often now

Claudia said...

I found the site really interesting because it is so interactive in that users have control of the music they want to listen to. LAST.FM users have the ability to create their own playlist. It's also useful because you can ban tracks you dislike and save the songs that you really enjoy listening to. Although there is a monthy cost, I find that this music site pays off because it features a variety of artists, albums, music videos, etc. Overall, the group did a great job in reseraching the site indepth and making me want to subscribe.

Matt said...

I've always thought this site was interesting, good job on the blog you guys did

shawn blair said...

I'm still torn between last.fm and pandora. Pandora's great because I can just create a "station" by choosing an artist, song, or genre, and that's it, and the website works seamlessly with my phone. Last.fm is nice because I can actually select specific songs I want to hear.
i will probably use pandora more often because I can just set it and forget it. But if I want to discover new artists and hear their discography then I will use Last.fm.
I'm just glad websites are finally doing something productive with all this technology.

Lauren Graham said...

I really liked how you can see how many people are listening to the same thing you are. Also, three bucks a month is not bad at all!