Social music revolution

05Nov06

I used Last.fm a while ago, on this blog actually…But I didn’t find anything in its features that got me “hooked” on it. It may have “15 million unique active users per month from 200 countries, listening to 65 million songs from 7 million artists. The site includes 150,000 wikis about artists and 350,000 tags.”

The wikis and the tags do make it unique indeed, but it seemed to be too much of a search and clicking around for me. I guess, I am traditional when it comes to finding music – popping a CD into my stereo, or hooking up my laptop/mp3 to it.

“…new to the site are free MP3s for listening to and downloading from independent music labels. The company says it offers music from 24,000 independent labels who have uploaded their music to Last.fm. There is not an option to opt out from having free MP3s recommended by the player.

ILike uses a community the community vetting process of GarageBand.com whereas Last.fm recommends songs based on similar playing habits of other users. Pandora’s recommendations come from analyzing the tonal qualities songs for similarities.

The most interesting of the new features is the concert ticket sales. This is something that every music recommendation engine will want to get into in time as it’s such a logical means of monetization. Last.fm provides links to buy tickets to see musicians you are listening to or that it recommends when the service determines that those artists are playing soon within the geographic area you’ve designated…

On principle I would love to be supportive of all these moves to support independent musicians, but my experience makes that difficult. Independent punk is good, but in most other genres the bulk of unsigned musicians are not music I want to listen to. I can’t help but think that all of this emphasis on indie bands is motivated primarily by economic necessity…”

Maybe that’s what it is – I can’t get hooked on these cool features/sites because of the majority of the audience’s preference in music genres. I listen to what is not -mainstream, that’s for sure. It’s not all about indie/indie rock, sorry.

|competitor Pandora|

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