I had fun over the Fourth of July rummaging around the Internet Wayback and looking at old images of audioscrobber.net, Richard Jones’ early version of Scrobbling as he was joining forces with Last.fm. Here is screenshot circa November 2004. Jones was a third year student at the University of Southampton at the time he cooked this […]
On April 28, Last.fm will shut down its subscription radio stream. That means the company won’t be streaming content through its own servers, just third party stuff, mostly from YouTube and Spotify. “We understand that many of you will not like this decision,” a Last.fm forum post announced on Wednesday. A flood of Last.fm users agreed. […]
I am enjoying Epic Dance Music, a beta application that draws from SoundCloud searches to create terrific dance playlist stations. Over the weekend I listened to a list riffing off of my initial pick: “Catgroove” by Parov Stelar. This was followed by a Decibel Junkies tune, DJ Trademark’s “Uncontrollable,” MGMT Kids, “BlogsDemodaCE,” Hello’s very amusing […]
You don’t hear a great deal about Last.fm these days, in large part because it has been eclipsed by a myriad of new streaming music services. But on Wednesday the company announced that it had forged a deal with Spotify to bring the latter’s whole catalogue to Last.fm users. “Whether it be your own profile […]
The “what is radio” debate resurfaced earlier this month. Do Pandora and other streaming music services qualify as “radio”? Jennifer Lane, President of RAIN Summits, pronounced the question irrelevant at her Audio4cast blog. “I say who cares whether it’s radio or not,” Lane declared. But some weeks earlier Pandora’s Tim Westergren posted a commentary explaining the […]
I’ve been writing a lot about Internet radio and mobile devices these days. But sometimes I think there are advantages to tuning in on my PC laptop instead. Advantage number one: avoiding monthly charges. Most radio social networking applications on your PC are free with advertisements, including Last.fm. But want to get Last on your […]
Yikes, what a week for social networking security. First LinkedIn reported a compromise of 6.5 million passwords, next came eHarmony, now Last.fm! Last.fm subscribers have received this e-mail from the radio/music service: We are currently investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords. This follows recent password leaks on other sites, as well as information […]
Spotify‘s radio feature has so far seemed like an afterthought. Ostensibly it was based on the same idea as Pandora–you pick an artist and then Spotify picks songs by other artists that are similar. In my tests of the feature I found that the picks were pretty narrow and repetitive, with the same artist cropping […]
Clear Channel may have been too focused on scarfing up stations in the early 2000s to construct anything resembling an internet strategy, but the company has been making up for lost time with its iHeartRadio service. When it went live in 2008 it was primarily a site and mobile app to provide access to the […]
My Amazon Kindle Fire arrived in the mail on Thursday, and I’ve been fiddling with it ever since. Got my Facebook going, read a whole lot of newspapers via the Pulse application, and downloaded a free edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After several days of downloading and noodling with various apps, however, I’m inclined […]
