Ricky Aguilar & Taylor Heinz
Professor Burgess
Evaluation
English 101
6 December 2013
Last.fm began as a simple music scrobbling application, and over time transformed itself into a 280 million dollar investment for CBS. The website has many key features that music listeners strive to obtain in hopes of broadening their music libraries and staying connected with both their peers as well as the world’s personal playlists. While it does have its limitations with mobile users, customers willing to pay are not left empty handed.
On first arrival of the site, both registered and non-registered visitors are provided with artist’s names that have the largest amount of listeners at that instance. This gives newcomers the opportunity to click a familiar name or feed their interest by testing out the functions of the playlist radio. When an artist’s name is clicked upon, the site will take you to that artist’s profile page. There is an option of playing the chosen artist’s radio is off to the side, however the page being browsed mainly focuses in on the artist themselves. Underneath pictures of the bands, are user-submitted tags that place their music into a specific genre such as indie-rock, experimental, folk, and so on. This is followed by the band’s biography that includes details such as the date in which the band was created and a chronological explanation of the records they have made all the way up to the present date. These biographies can be edited by users just incase any new information about a record has been released. Underneath the biography is a video player that has a playlist of all of the artist’s music videos that were uploaded to the site, which are ready to be played at the listener’s discretion. This makes it simple for the user to decide whether or not they are into the band before even using their radio. The video playlists are in correspondence with the top tracks of every artist, so that the first song to be played is the artist’s greatest hit. The artist profile is only the beginning of the Last.fm experience, in comparison to the offered profile features.
It is incredible how quickly one can connect to a world full of music that happens to be similar to the songs they have chosen to be in their own music library. The scrobble option allows Last.fm to access personal libraries on user’s computers so that it can provide the user with recommendations based on commonalities in the style of music of each individual artist, and song in their library. This is an excellent and direct way to instantly find the names of potential new favorite bands. While a radio is playing, stations that were previously played are available, along with the specific tracks played. This ensures the user that any of their great finds will never be lost. They are listed on the user’s page, and accompanied by another playlist of the songs that the user “loved” by clicking the heart icon on located on the playlist widget.
Sharing music with friends has been made exceptionally easy, and also encouraged. Last.fm takes personal playlists and compares them to that of another users playlist in order to calculate compatibility. This gives the user the liberty of searching through someone else’s profile and listening to some artists that these musically compatible individuals may have already been aware of.
If radios and Last.fm users don’t seem to open enough doors to new varieties of music, users can take advantage of an entire collection of all the current top tracks specific to different countries around the world. The track list goes up to one hundred and fifty, making it nearly impossible to miss out on a new trending song. It is quite amazing how many possibilities reside in this factor of the website alone, considering that Last.fm has been on the web since 2002 and has track lists for every year leading up to the present. They have gone as far as to put every music scrobble throughout the past ten years in one timeline. This is an extraordinary amount of music that touches on classics from Led Zeppelin to artists just entering the music industry. That isn’t where it ends either.
One of a kind recordings are available in the “Originals” section of the website, where intimate sessions are placed. Listeners searching for the “out of the recording studio” feel can gather here to experience music in its purest form. Acoustic fanatics are bound to be pleased by the high definition video and enjoyable sound quality. Interviews during these sessions are also included, but are separated into their own videos from time to time.
Aside from the actual listening of music online, Last.fm keeps it’s users up to date with all of their favorite artists upcoming tours and shows around the world, including those in the user’s area. Last.fm also features details on some of the biggest music festivals around the world, such as Coachella, Lollapalooza and Pink Pop. As insanely vast as Last.fm is however, every rose has its thorns.
Though Last.fm has many intriguing features, one of its major flaws was the fact that it is not always completely user friendly. In comparison with other popular music sites such as Pandora or Spotify, upon entering the site there was no absolute certainty about any feature and how they work. At first glance of the radio, events page, and scrobbling features, making full sense of any of it seemed challenging. The mobile aspect of Last.fm is up for debate as well.
For both android and apple phone devices, the application for Last.fm is available for free download. This is deceiving however, because the radio aspect of the app is not free. You must pay a one-time fee, in order to have access to the usual artist playlists, upcoming concerts, and music scribbling. This serves as a common reason many avoid committing to Last.fm, and enjoy the free use and listening privileges of Pandora.
The hefty amount of links filling up the homepage makes it seem incredibly cluttered as well. Almost everything is written in 13 point Lucida Grande font. This makes it difficult for users to focus on a single idea at a time. With most other sites, fonts are made diverse in size and color in order to make it easier for users to utilize important aspects of the website. Last.fm seems to take a million different ideas and smash them all into one homepage. Pandora’s site for example had simple directions on how to function the website.
Scrobbling for example raised many questions. When connected to your iTunes account, it scans the library music and creates things called Scrobbles. When you click on each Scrobble of a song it takes you to a page that shows the music video, similar tracks, the lyrics, when it was trending, and how many other people also Scrobbled the song. This feature seemed incredibly innovative until it became apparent every time the computer is turned on, Last.fm would re-Scrobble all songs leaving mass amounts of duplicates. It was also noticed that Last.fm would only scan a small number of songs in an iTunes account and of those songs, the option to buy other songs that were similar was only available through Amazon. Seeing as the leading music distributor today is iTunes, Last.fm should re-consider the use of Amazon. The comparison of Pandora’s radio function and Last.fm’s should also be taken into account.
The radio is Last.fm’s most popular feature, but is rightfully compared with Pandora who seemingly gives the same kind of services. On Last.fm, you can skip a song seven times an hour whereas on Pandora you can skip six songs an hour, which is a plus. However, advertisements on Last.fm come on immediately after an attempt to play the radio is made. Pandora only plays advertisements every three to five songs and does not start your listening experience with a commercial. Also, Last.fm take three seconds, at the least, between songs in order to match a song with your chosen artist or genre. Pandora only takes three seconds at the maximum to load a new song and you can choose your station not only based on artist or genre, but also on song title. The same is true for Last.fm, which makes the use of either a difficult decision to make.Being one of today’s top music sources, Last.fm does a great job at giving it’s audience a unique listening experience while also creating a site layout that is appealing to the eye. Though this site does have a few flaws, what site doesn’t? These flaws are easily fixed and are enormously overshadowed by the mass amounts of amazing features that Last.fm offers. This site is the equivalent of Ticketmaster, YouTube, Pandora, and iTunes all rolled up into one. Artists love it, fans love it, and even critics love it. It is an inarguable fact that utilizers of Last.fm are provided with just about every opportunity to make additions to their musical lives. Last.fm does its job, and it does it well.
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