Last.fm interview: Behind the music

By Rory Reid on 25 November 2009, 10:32am

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Last.fm is a powerful tool that lets you see into the mind of the music-buying public. It could be very valuable to the record industry at large. What's your working relationship with the record labels?

"We have pretty strong relationships with most of the majors and they've definitely been interested at one time or another in pulling specific data to, for example, judge what an artist's next single should be. In aggregate, a lot of our data is very useful to them and we're obviously very careful about that. We are hardcore geeks -- died in the wool Unix nerds if you go back into our history -- so as a result our data is under lock and key. It is stored in ways where you can get useful information out in aggregate, but we feel very strongly about ensuring individual users' private data is not identifiable.

"Our users trust us with something that's very important to them and close to their hearts. Scrobbling essentially gives us permission to spy on our listeners' music habits and the reason they let us do that is because they get so much more out of it at the other end, including full data export. We're constantly working on new products that make more use of our data and we have a team of music scientists that spend all day figuring out better algorithms.

"We've got a few things coming soon including a 'Best of 2009' feature, which is based entirely on scrobble. With this, you can overlay your personal listening history for the year on top of the larger trends.

Any plans to sell music digitally?

"We've debated this for years. When I first joined in 2005 that was one of the things on the whiteboard. Ultimately, now, in a way, buying music online is almost a solved problem.

"There are tonnes of shops like iTunes, lots of speciality online shops for different labels and genres, so our role is to make sure whenever you find music on Last.fm you can purchase it from the best shop in the best country in the format you want. We've been working hard on improving our system for linking to ecommerce, because we think that's very important."

Who's the most popular artist in the Last.fm's history?

"This may be quite underwhelming, but just in the last month The Beatles have ascended to the throne of 'most scrobbled artist ever'. Their recent re-releases have given them the extra push they needed. For a long time Radiohead and Coldplay were the chart toppers.

"This presents huge problems to our recommendation algorithm guys, because if you enter either of those bands, it recommends every other popular artist. We've had to do a lot of work to de-Radiohead-ify our algorithms!

"Generally though, having The Beatles on top represents the fact our audience spans all age groups."

How many people access Last.fm on a fixed PC versus those on the move?

"At the minute, about 5 per cent of all our streams are mobile streams and that's been growing steadily since we launched our first official iPhone app, which is now about a year and a half old. There are plenty of other apps built by third parties, which is something we're encouraging.

"Anywhere you're listening to music is where we want to be, so our mobile-streaming strategy is just as important as our mobile-scrobbling strategy. We want Last.fm to be your definitive music profile and the URL that you can send someone when they ask, 'Hey, what are you listening to?' We want to be everywhere and mobile's really exciting for that.

"On a related note, there are a couple of different apps in development using our events API and creating gig finders in your city. They take the list of concerts we have and overlaying those on a map to show you what's happening near you on any given night."

CBS is launching over-the-air HD radio stations in the US, where playlists are generated by Last.fm's weekly charts. Why is a Web 2.0 company embracing old-school radio?

"It's tempting to think of it as counterintuitive, but it's really complementary. There's never been a radio station that's actually influenced by what real people are listening to around the world with rich data updated weekly. It's also great for getting the Last.fm name and brand and what we're about in front of a wider audience who are used to traditional radio. It's a gentle way of introducing the concept and they might be intrigued about the workings behind it and go and check out the Web site."