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.

Comments

NOT FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

the bastard started charging $6/month for everyone a month or so back. only the US, UK and germany are temporarily free. before committing data to the service better check the TOS and decide.

CNET and last.fm are both owned by CBS Interactive

[boot_img]

... so this article is not really journalism, but rather marketing.