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I have heard that the music players will be back on last fm soon which is good news for all of us DIY musicians here at Last fm.

Project Bluebird

Unfortunately, since last.fm has switched to a new website layout, browsing the site is now much less of a pleasure, and my very own profile page now also looks outright crappy. And there's nothing I can do about it. :-(

I just hope that they won't ruin the design of the last.fm player in a similar way. OK, there are other players around, so even that would not be the end, but still, I always found last.fm to be more than just a radio provider, and I don't want to shudder and feel regret every moment I am interacting with last.fm in any visual way.

Recently at last.fm, someone seems to have been able to get into user accounts, and make postings completely at odds with what the poster was known to do, when they were active @ last.fm.

Specifically, I noticed the account of the user 'obbrio' which has been in disuse for about 7 months, and now suddenly is posting shouts about about some promotion that sony is doing. Otherwise, there's no activity on that account, in other words, no scrobbling, et cetera.

Earlier this week, someone hacked into my facebook account, and although facebook locked my account until I changed my password, I find it worrying since I have used strong passwords on all accounts for the last 15 years online, and there have been no successful intrusions or hacks into my accounts, ever.
I am compelled to conclude that someone on the facebook side of things, ie, on their administrative side, accessed, permitted someone to access, or perhaps they were hacked into on the server and administrative side.

If I see more of this activity, I will be compelled to close my social networking accounts, since having that type of uncertainty with my online presence is intolerable.

What have you noticed?

What have you done about it?

I regret to feel this way, since I can say many good things about last.fm and facebook. But, perhaps it is a time for a positive change.

Why has this thang' on subscriptions felt so important for so many ("way over the top" according to some), despite not being an issue of life and death? My suspicion, based in part on my own feelings and analysis, is that the principle dilemmas undelying these problems are, if not in analogy, nonetheless very descriptive of the current global political situation (i.e., typical) .

Last.fm could definitely do better than charge everyone the same, regardless of purchasing power, since everyone contributes equally with tagging and other "community work" such as creating fan- and group pages; e.g., the Brazilian users created several stations like the "Manguebeat", from South Africa we got "Township Jive" and "South African Jazz," and from Portugal we got "Capo Verde" and so on, not to mention all the groups. This work we all do can be seen as an analogy to the global work done, wherever work is done and whatever it is, be it tilling the soil, child-rearing, working on an assembly line, or reviewing the legal aspects of a big merger/acquisition deal for a transnational company producing shampoo or cell-phones. All work is needed to create the global wealth and growth that is currently trickling down, albeit in unequal numbers, to rich people living in the already rich parts of the world. It's just a matter of indirect or direct power, however illegitimate, who get's what portion of this accumulated labor surplus.

It is NOT EQUAL to demand that these listeners mentioned pay the same as listeners in Sweden, the U.S., Germany, or Canada, similarly as it would not be authentically equal to demand from a female sweatshop-worker in Vietnam to pay the same price for grain, salt, or milk, as stock-brokers pay on Manhattan. That is formally neutral but comes with a discriminatory impact. There is even a legal doctrine outlawing such practices in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, India, and in International Law, among other jurisdictions. This law is referred to as substance equality law, or the "disparate impact doctrine".

There might even be legal remedies against this new scheme from Last.fm, but I think it is premature to discuss such action at this moment. Indeed, this is not about life and death, but the whole fee-issue is very symptomatic for neo-liberalism which, not least in these days, finally seems to have reached a dead end.

Sincerely
DSJ

Hi all,

Below is my response to Last.fm - the blog . Yes, it does!

Last.fm, I'm afraid I have to echo what those before me have already pointed out.

I've been using (and loving) the site for nearly 5 years now, clearly before the on-demand listening was introduced. This development, whilst not devastating, can only be viewed as a huge step backwards.

Imagine Google. Imagine if two years down the line from launching their webmail service Gmail, they announced "you know what, Hotmail has got webmail covered pretty well. I think we'll just focus on our search engine". Why are you outsourcing a perfectly functionable service?

You appear to be overlooking that I, and many other Last.fm users, don't want to sign up to Spotify, Vevo, The Hype Machine or any of the websites you're pushing. We like Last.fm, and we like a service that expands to its users demands.

Furthermore, in saying "on-demand listening is not as popular as radio plays etc", you are comparing the service unfairly given its circumstances. What you have essentially done is introduce a service to a sample population (UK, US, Ger), run it as a trial for the duration of it's life cycle, then withdrawn it for not being as popular as its fellow, fully-implemented services. Well, what did you expect?!

Moreover, as afore mentioned by others, this is devastating news for independent artists trying to make their way on Last.fm. As grand as your Radio system is, its algorithm is based primarily on user tags - something that small, unheard bands don't happen to have! An entire network of users & artists is wholly dependant on word of mouth recommendations and on-demand listening.

From a personal perspective, this is a critical time for me as a volunteer music PR promoting the unsigned rock band Soulcage, who release their second album on the 23rd of this month. How can I now, with on-demand streaming abolished, suggest suitable listeners to check out Soulcage's music? I'll tell you how - by directing them to MySpace. Congratulations Last.fm - you are throwing business away!!

And finally, please stop claiming to be a "people's website" that listens and responds to the views of it's users. You're not! Not anymore. Don't worry, this doesn't make you aliens - there are plenty of businesses who don't give a toss what their users think, and I'm sorry to realise that you've become one.

Shaun

Edit:
I'm throwing on some band tags to spread the news a bit - it seems it hasn't resonated through-out the site yet.
Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Airbourne, White Wizzard, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Heaven & Hell, Iced Earth, Blind Guardian, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Testament, Poison, Dream Theater, The Butterfly Effect, Karnivool, Cog, Guns N' Roses, Kiss, Van Halen, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Led Zeppelin, Rainbow, Whitesnake, Manowar, Gamma Ray, Helloween, Hammerfall, Majesty, Running Wild, Saxon, Halford, Dio, Bruce Dickinson, Blaze, Nazareth, UFO, Pink Floyd, Tool, The Doors, Grave Digger, Edguy, Sabaton, HIM, Falconer, HOLY GRAIL, Rob Zombie, Coldplay, Muse, Lydia, R.E.M., U2, Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Arctic Monkeys, Lady Gaga, Gorillaz, The Beatles, MGMT, The Killers, Owl City, Kings of Leon, Nirvana, Linkin Park, Green Day, Pink Floyd, Black Eyed Peas, Michael Jackson, Foo Fighters, Paramore, Queen, System of a Down, Placebo, Oasis

This is probably my first and last journal entry ever. I just wanted to help other users who might have run into same kind of problems with Libre.fm integration.

I tried to export my tracks using the lastscrape.py script. The problem was that I had over 100000 scrobbled tracks in Last.fm, and the script couldn't get them all without some kind of http error stopping it at some point. On the next run it would start again from the beginning, so it would probably never get them all.

So I decided to take a look at the script and Python documentation. I managed to modify the script so that it would take a starting page number as an parameter, and also print out what page it was currently trying to get. Then I could tell the script where to begin on the next run, if it was interrupted. It took six runs to get all the 2007 pages of tracks.

Then I followed the instructions to remove all the duplicates. Had no problems there.

Then I tried the import.py script and got this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./import.py", line 48, in ?
dt = datetime.strptime(timestamp, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")
AttributeError: type object 'datetime.datetime' has no attribute 'strptime'

Apparently the script doesn't work on Python 2.4. I modified it using this old thread as an example. After the change I was finally able to import all my tracks to Libre.fm.

Then I just had to configure my media player to scrobble both to Libre.fm and Last.fm (just in case). The instructions worked fine for Foobar 2000, had no problems there.

You can find the modified scripts here:

• lastscrape.py: http://pastebin.com/f7031b187 (differences highlighted here)
• import.py: http://pastebin.com/f1743b5a5 (differences highlighted here)