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The Technology Behind Last.fm
CNET's Crave has up a detailed interview with Last.fm's Matthew Ogle, the company's head of Web development. Reader CNETNate notes that Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world. From the interview: "We stream all music directly off our servers in London. We have a cluster of streaming nodes including a bunch of powerful machines with solid-state hard drives. We have a process that runs daily which finds the hottest music and pushes those tracks on to the SSDs streamers that sit in front of our regular platter-based streaming machines. That way, if someone is listening to one of our more popular stations, the chances are really good that these songs are coming off our high-speed SSD machines. They're fast because every song is sitting in memory instead of being on a slow, spinning platter." The interview is actually on two pages but pretends it's on three.
I really hope that was an attempt to dumb it down for the article. It's a pretty poor way of describing the difference between HDDs and SSDs. After all, HDDs are a form of non-volatile memory too. They just happen to have a mechanical aspect.
In fact, the only way in which they could stream music without having it all in memory first is if they were using a microphone and a live band. Sure, it might make for an entertaining data center, but it's not very scalable.
Last.fm's definition of "hottest" is what people actually listen to. It's not a handful of artist names handed down from MusicMegaCorpCoLLC to be digested by the uninformed masses ;)
The masses' musical tastes are still mostly decided by "MusicMegaCorpCoLLC", even if not directly through Last.fm.
The same general pool of artists is popular on Last.fm as is popular on radio.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
They're fast because every song is sitting in memory instead of being on a slow, spinning platter."
Aren't the HDDs (the one's with platters) still considered memory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory
Computer memory refers to devices that are used to store data or programs (sequences of instructions) on a temporary or permanent basis for use in an electronic digital computer.
Uh, the only impact being the "hottest new music" has is being served from one of their SSD hosts instead of the normal streaming cluster. This is completely transparent to the user. It doesn't limit what you can listen to or even make it more likely you'll hear "hot new" music from an SSD host. It's caching of the most popular files, plain and simple.
>Why is that? I didn't realise that ones taste in music could be such a defining characteristic.
It's a generational thing I suspect. Many people of my generation (I'm mid forties) very much define people by their music, especially what they listened to in their youth. The particular sub culture you belonged to as a teen was strongly related to your musical tastes and general mindset. These days, fashion/tribe is still important but the music side less so - you can have kids who dress the same but have very different tastes in music.
An additional point is that a lot of people get caught up with the various hype machines and buy in to certain artists even though in all truth, they're a bit crap. This marks them out to the rest of us as being a bit mindless, easily led etc.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I'm not sure if you've really missed the point, or are just trolling (making me an idiot for replying..).
The idea of putting the "most popular" tracks on SSD is to make it more efficient to stream the tracks that are more likely to be requested.
It's optimising the efficient use of their hardware. It doesn't have anything to do with last.fm's suggestions algorithms and does not at all mean last.fm will force these tracks on you.
You're amusingly uninformed considering you're throwing around terms like "sheeple".
>Being familiar with music from hotties like Timberlake and Daughtry makes you popular with the ladies
Call me picky but I wouldn't be interested in a woman that liked that sort of music.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
>>>This marks them out to the rest of us as being a bit mindless, easily led etc.
I've found that those who listen to "alternative" music have the same flaws, but are merely following a different type of peer pressure (the pressure to listen to non-popular music).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Don't judge them too harshly. Unless you went to school for music, or otherwise spent some quality time cultivating an appreciation for the organization of sound, you probably don't have any taste. Music seems to be the last area where anyone bothers to develop taste nowadays.
In this age when everyone is concerned with breaking down the barriers and bucking elitism, maybe listening to pop trash makes your well-heeled friends feel folksy and good about themselves.
I did go to school for music, and did play professionally for about a decade before I went in to IT/software, and I'm pretty confident when I observe that, for most people, the words are the music. They don't hear pitches, just lyrics.
If the unschooled person hears something more than the lyrics, it's usually only the highest and lowest pitches at any given moment (the relationship between the bass and melody). All that western harmony in the middle spectrum is really lost on them. That's what my music cognition friends have to say about it, anyway.
Of all the so-called "social" sites whose services I use, Last.fm probably has the best uptime and overall availability. I think I've only seen the main Last.fm site down once or twice in over two years, and I've never seen the Scrobbling service go offline. On top of that, they can actually run a database - unlike Facebook, with its oft-inaccurate or missing data, all of my Last.fm profile is always there. Kudos to these guys for sticking to it and figuring out how to manage high loads properly instead of just whining about how inadequate the tools they have to work with are.
--- Mr. DOS
Being familiar with music from hotties like Timberlake and Daughtry makes you popular with the ladies. Saying, "Those guys are crap" is only going to get you dumped
By "ladies" you of course mean: girls under 18, or fat old women who wear Betty Boop/Disney pajamas and form Twilight fan clubs.
Me and my girlfriend spent many a night bonding over Slayer and Mike Patton, which suited me just fine. I'd actually be very frightened if she listened to Justin Timberlake (and whoever "Daughtery" is), since there is something very strange about a 30 year old listening to 2000's teeny-bopper music. People shouldn't be frightened of growing up.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey