April 12 Site Update - track page beta, streaming changes

pogopatterson said:
Not quite sure who was responsible for the quip about each update spawning a different set of protestors (FranticManiac-I think). I personally don't think this is the death of LFM either, but withdrawing the priviledge of full plays is a substantive change to the core offering of the service, not cosmetic or cultural.

I wouldn't be so confident though about the financial strategy underpinning the decision. Offering your users a click through to sites offering full plays, who are ultimately developping the social networking side of their business, is the equivalent of delivering customers to your rivals. It might take a few years, but unless LFM come up with some kind of competitive advantage over rivals, they will lose further ground. Not listening to their existing customers is a good way of hastening this process.Conveniently omitting that they are now back.

Not to mention another global riot because full tracks would only be available in those three regions again.

Two months and 2 weeks later, this thread still has life in it..?

Please keep the personal attacks towards individuals of these forums Clocklesshours so people can use it for feedback 8)

Not your fault.

FranticManiac said:
Please keep the personal attacks towards individuals of these forums Clocklesshours so people can use it for feedback 8)
You can do the same. 8)

Babs_05 said:
Your (group's) current activities have not been picked up by anyone and there are no reports of any particular unrest in Last.fm.
Oh ok. If that's the case, then you can stop talking about us, right? Since we're so unimportant and all. ;-)

LFM haven't grasped one reality of online business in the Internet Age.

Getting the offering right and maintaining your lead over the opposition is the equivalent of walking a tight rope.

The strength of a Web based company cannot be measured in terms of the overall numbers of its users in the same way as you could count on the customers of a bricks and mortar business. Online users are twitchy and are only ever one click away from striking up a relationship with rival competitors. The switch can happen imperceptibly at first and then become an avalanche. Recent historical precedents are everywhere. And yes, anytime in the last ten years is still within a relatively recent timeframe.

Anyone remember the last time they used Copernic, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and to a lesser degree Yahoo for online search. Google stole a march because it worked out the degree of intrusiveness we would put up with, in relation to ads, and made them relevant to search. Yes their Page rank technology was better, but their ontold wealth comes from Google Ads. And I know people will argue that the wealth of a business is not necessarily an indication of its usefulness to society, but I don't see any well known non profit making organizations in the field of search. Wikipedia perhaps is the only major Web 2.0 non profit making organisation that is a household name.

Same goes for MySpace, Bebo and any other number of Web 2.0 Social Networking sites. Not that I use social networking sites as much as Search, but I am told that the fact that you have greater customization of your Profile page on Facebook, gave Zuckerberg the lead here. Another subtle change in useability leading to a big change in the relative worth of billion dollar company share values. The "network effect" does the rest. And Facebook now seems to be leading the charge in creating huge ad revenues by introducing Peer Recommendation into its network.

Anyway in Online terms, you can't get any bigger than Google and Facebook and both companies came up on the outside rail to take the lead. Last.fm shouldn't dismiss the significance of dissent, it might just be that the customer is right. What am I saying, the customer is always right.

PS, Staffers and Moderators, if you can't think about us customers, think about your shareholders.

You should lose some weight. ;-)

It is in the left tab column under Similar Artists. No it isn't. You are right.

pogopatterson said:
PS, Staffers and Moderators, if you can't think about us customers, think about your shareholders.

I'd rather say the matter is the other way round. What shareholder(s) think and say is crucial, not what we users (or staff or moderators) ask for.

Since last.fm was taken over by CBS the matter of interest shifted and from many (most old?) users' point of view it began tumbling down.

In every (show/media(-related) )business, be it managing a venue or a portal with classified ads, you must decide whether attracting new customers will balance losing old ones, and be vary of sudden aggresive monetization because it will yield more profit in the short term yet disgust loyal users (and hardly attract new ones).
Look at Facebook now after a few years ago it was losing money every quartal.

Re: the secret of their success - it's a scaleable RESTful quick social webapp not a clumsy social junkyard like myspace; a paradox is that it offers _less_ customization of a public profile page and is more focused on lifestreaming; plus their FOAF friend discovery scheme gave Facebook an edge.

Richard Jones should have thought twice before signing a contract with those apparently nice guys.
Two nice guys came to Idealab and returned with a hint on how to get money out of web search.
Is it really _so hard_ to get money out of a music recommendation engine + recommendation-based internet radio + a music-centered social network?
Hell it's not and right now I have a good idea on how it could earn more (but will keep it for myself, it's so natural and plain that you might have a clue anyway) - watch out and the technology will be up to it.

I doubt now CBS would sell last.fm easily now even if they were losing their investment on it.

Hell Richard could have waited and perhaps have ever-expanding Google or (one day) Facebook buy them.
Now he's not with last.fm anymore. And last.fm is owned by a giant who also has other sheep in the herd to care for.

It's a law Google proved that wherever you have a huge userbase connected to a torrent of addictive information, you can make money out of it without asking them to pay.



Read this to have an idea what RJ could/should have (not) done:

http://blogs.zoho.com/general/why-we-haven-t-taken-venture-capital

To see how to get users pay, check out ReadItLater (http://readitlaterlist.com/) - their secret is that for a little premium feature (digest) they ask $5 lifetime payment and, which is important, they began asking money for the feature since the moment it was introduced.

preco said:
dankine said:
there's a tags button on the left menu on every track page.

The tags button on every track page leads to tags linked to the interpret, not a particular track.

That's the fault.

Show me the HTML markup for anything on a track page that shows tags for a particular track. Tagging tracks isn't the same as tagging interprets.
The "see more" button that appears next to the list of tags on the track page links there. It only appears when the track has at least a certain number of different tags.

preco said:
Tagging tracks isn't the same as tagging interprets.What's an interpret?

As I recall, the tags on the left didn't allow for tagging tracks before, either. The "save" dropdown does let you tag the track there.