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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.
Reader CNETNate notes that Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world
Where did the submitter get that impression? Certainly not from the article. It mentions that they scrobbled 275,000 years of audio. Scrobbling is what Last.fm's client does when it takes a song you are playing from another source and uploads the meta data to them. Clearly that uses much less bandwidth than streaming a song
So now even the submitters aren't reading TFA anymore? I know, I know... its slashdot. /sigh
Last.fm is definitely a way to feel awkward with friends. Some of my acquaintances are well-read, well-dressed, well-spoken people, the sort who really seem to have it all together, but then you can never really manage the same level of respect for them after you've seen their Last.fm profile is nothing but Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga.
56,904,147 plays (1,246,583 listeners)
http://www.last.fm/charts
:)
What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.
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
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.
English, you insensitive clod.
"I'd love to know how much of that was stuff like Britney Spears."
Unfortunately, you'd probably have to measure that metric in Libraries of Congress.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
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 ;)
I suggest looking at what Last.fm actually is. It has helped me find new music frequently. It also made me spend lots of money, which is the only real drawback. Anything you play is recorded, and musical compatibility with other members is compared to give suggestions. There might not be samples of everything on their site, but I usually find samples somewhere (Spotify is the weakest, iTunes and eMusic usually has it).
What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.
Only if you're a republican; plenty of northern irish identify themselves as "british".
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'
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
UKanian? ;)
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
What do you call someone from the UK? .
a subject
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".
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.
But you can:
http://www.last.fm/listen#pane=multiArtistTab
I agree, though, at some point it will either expand its scope, loop the playlist, or just stop (saying it ran out of appropriate stuff to stream). Frankly, though, if given a narrow topic (and a finite music library), what else could it do?
"Good news, everyone!"
choice of software...
You're new here?
>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
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
>>>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
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
They haven't really decided. Rule of thumb, all the U.K. areas except England tend to go by their own name, and England goes by British about 50-50, depending on age, politics, etc. But what do I know? That is just my guess from observing some Wikipedia disputes over this issue.
The "demonym" for the U.K. is "British". That includes Northern Ireland... an awkward situation. Of course, we have "Americans" meaning just the U.S. And back in the olden days, you either called the people of the USSR "Russians" (wrong) or "Soviets" (sort of wrong).
Now all you UKians with you witty humor, just read the funny thread.
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