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Managing Last.FM's "Mountain of Data"
Rob Spengler writes "Last.FM co-founder Richard Jones says the biggest asset the company owns is 'hundreds of terabytes of user data.' Jones adds, '... playing with that data is one of the most fun things about working at the company.' Last.FM, for those who have been living on Mars for the last two years, is the largest online radio outlet, with millions of listeners per day. The company surpassed Pandora and others largely due to its unique datamining features: 'Audioscrobbler,' the company's song/artist naming algorithm, can correctly determine a track even with tens of thousands of false entries. Jones says sitting on that much data has even helped police: 'thieves listening to music on an Audioscrobbler-powered media player have helped police in the US, UK, and other countries track down users' stolen laptops.' Does sitting on a mountain of data make Last.FM powerful enough to start making a stand against the record industry? CBS certainly thinks so — they bought the company for £140 (~$200) million last year."
A buddy of mine used to run this matching website for teachers & students. Free for teachers, and the students had to pay a nominal amount to get the teachers' contact info, and after that, it was up to them to arrange for lessons. The site was popular, and he made decent money at it. I bugged him and bugged him to organize parties, and eventually he came around to my way of thinking (he wanted to make some money without his parasite partner getting it). He used the list of emails from his website to send party invitations for a monthly get-together. He made more money from the parties than he did from the website.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
what i find most interesting is the order certain songs "go together", like listening to a song from Slayer, followed by, say, "someday i suppose" from the bosstones. when composing songlists, i appreciate how similar songs and moods can flow, but also how the contrast of dissimilar songs can SOMETIMES compliment each other.
a large database could ferret out such instances that might occur frequently in multiple playlists.
The summary wasn't insulting enough, so I think I'll just add a bit extra.
Last.FM is so popular that if you aren't familiar with the service, you must be a drooling, knuckle dragging luddite.
Apparently I'm not one of the cool kids. I'm sad now, and my feelings are hurt.
If you could (accurately) answer that question, then you'd act upon the answer...
Why do you think Google ads are Google's bread and butter as far as cashflow goes? The reason is that Google has a treasure trove of user data, probably more than anyone else, so they can really make contextual ads work. Anyone can write an ad engine, but not everyone has access to mountains and mountains of user data.
You might be surprised at how important context is when you're trying to promote something. Say you're trying to promote an online RPG like Game!, if you took a random collection of people, probably less than 5% of them would be interested in playing, but if you can target gamers specifically, that number might jump to 50%. If you're paying for every impression, that makes a world of difference.
So not only do you need to understand your audience, you also need to effectively target them. Now, how do you do that? Data mining of course, and the more data the better.
Pretty much all data has value, figuring out how to turn that data into money is extremely subjective and might involve some black magic, and definitely requires luck too.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Information wants to be free.
Information wants to be a ballerina.
Best Slashdot comment ever
CBS certainly thinks so -- they bought the company for £140 (~$200) million last year.
Which is why whatever comes of them, at best it will be evolutionary. CBS is part of the old guard RIAA corps, they are just one of the faces of Viacom - all controlled by Summer Redstone. They may have brought some money to the table, but they brought a whole ton of baggage with them too. Enough baggage to make this privacy freak decide they couldn't be trusted with all that data they've been collecting (for example, if they can track down a stolen laptop, they can track down someone playing an MP3 from an illegally leaked pre-release album).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Last.FM, for those who have been living on Mars for the last two years, is the largest online radio outlet, with millions of listeners per day.
You know, I'm not exactly what you'd call a Luddite, yet I've never heard of Last.FM. Am I the only one? I kind of doubt it.
I have a general gripe about anyone who writes "for those who have been living on Mars" anytime they reference some moderately popular company, service, or product. It smacks of arrogance, as if to say, if you don't have the same interests as I do, you're obviously disconnected from the mainstream.
Or perhaps I'm just annoyed for being called out on being a bit older and out of touch? Bah!
>>goes back to guarding lawn with a shotgun from an old rocking chair...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The company surpassed Pandora and others largely due to its unique datamining features
I would think that being available outside of the USA may have helped quite a bit as well.
Information wants to be free.
Information wants to be a ballerina.
Then information needs to get her fat ass on a diet or she's never going to fit into that tutu and make Mommy proud!
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
with last.fm is how it feeds my OCD issues regarding song playcounts. I nearly lost it when the stupid scrobbler started randomly recording excess playcounts on one album. It screwed with my numbers. Then it stopped counting that album's plays all together.
Seriously though, I have found using the site to be pretty enjoyable. And the advertisements are actually worth keeping AdBlock turned off for. I found a few new artists, some unsigned, that way. I like all the various widgets and things that can crunch my data. Songbird has a last.fm plugin/addon that makes for very easy integration. It's just really useful. I've also found concerts on the site.
I rarely use the social side of it, except with friends I already know. But that's me.
http://transformativeworks.org/
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