Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Technology Behind Last.fm

Posted by kdawson on from the not-just-scrobbled-together dept.

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.

6 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:275,000 years? Wow. by anthony.vo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://www.last.fm/charts

    They have detailed week-by-week charts going back to 2005. Lady Gaga is in fifth place this week is at 1,923,168 plays by 92,208 listeners.

    Muse, The Beatles, Radiohead, and Coldplay precede her, but that's likely due to the fact that Last.fm is based in the UK and the majority of their users from the UK* and that those bands are much much better :) What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.

  2. No thanks, last.fm by cbope · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This is precisely why I rarely listen to radio, whether it's streamed or broadcast over the air. They place too much weight on "the hottest new music", and this causes otherwise good music, which may not be "today's hottest new music" to be buried in the background noise. Not to mention that "the hottest new music" then gets played over and over, 100's of times a day on popular radio stations. This get boring and monotonous really quick. While radio can be a good way to discover new bands, I rarely listen to it for long periods of time because it just repeats the same tracks over and over. It's a very lopsided system that promotes the hottest single-of-the-day at the expense of everything else.

    1. Re:No thanks, last.fm by xtracto · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I do use Last.fm, unfortunately they do not have a wide range of artists, at least not of my liked genre.

      Every time I start a station with say the "Satriani" artist tag, I get the exact same 20 songs (in random order), before something completely unrelated start playing. I have the same results with "Kamelot", "Stratovarius" and "Dream Theater".

      I liked it more when you could specify two or three artists. That would give you a bit of more breadth on the pool of music to listen.

      Regarding alternatives, I have tried Musicology and it is OK, the only drawback being the "web2.0" interface which I really hate.

      BTW, the LastRipper program is a good way to save Last.FM streams. I have got a lot of classical music (at 128kbps quality is good for portable players)

      --
      Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
    2. Re:No thanks, last.fm by T+Murphy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Putting in a popular artist like Satriani or Dream Theater will get popular results out (not mainstream, but still popular). I listen to the 4 artists you list (Dream Theater is most listened, Kamelot is 9th)- the bands it recommends range from 60k listens to 10's of millions. While I've found some artists from their radio, I generally use the recommendations and my neighbor list to find new music, especially for lesser-known bands. The free tracks it suggests are often from small bands, so check those out too. While some bands are obscure enough last.fm doesn't have them up to stream, they usually at least have a page for the band- using the charts for the band I can check other sites to find streamed songs.

      That said, I do agree multiple tags/artists would help the radio work better. I usually pick a band I don't know and try to piece together a playlist on imeem using their most listened chart on last.fm.

      My last.fm username is tmurph89- you have similar enough taste you might find a new band you like in my charts. If you want something different Apocalyptica is a heavy cello quartet (although their top 5 tracks are overly mainstream and wise to avoid).

      --
      My webcomic
  3. Re:275,000 years? Wow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A lot of her scrobbles get deleted though:
    http://playground.last.fm/unwanted

  4. Re:275,000 years? Wow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Only if you're a republican; plenty of northern irish identify themselves as "british".

    So why is the name of the country the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? That name does suggest that Northern Ireland isn't part of Great Britain.

    Not trolling, just curious.