THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => BAND => Topic started by: casull on 30 May 2007, 13:00
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6701863.stm
I'm not sure how bothered I should be by this.
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Hopefully they won't change anything.
Lol, I like this picture from the article:
(http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42986000/jpg/_42986473_headphones203.jpg)
Caption: "The web has helped revolutionise listening to music."
Reality: That man is having a music SEIZURE.
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Is that why it keeps crashing today? Mine has "crashed" 6 times since I've been on the computer.
Caption: "The web has helped revolutionise listening to music."
Reality: That man is having a music SEIZURE.
For reals.
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You would have thought Last.FM is obscure enough not to attract attention from major corporations. I mean, it's not even close to YouTube in terms of membership and intarweb popularity.
Sigh- another good thing down the drain. I expect my user page will be filled with flashing ads shortly.
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I wouldn't use it myself but I understand the appeal.
Elaborate plz.
It can do that, yes. But I believe that most people use it as a record of what they already listen to rather than as another Pandora.
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I actually use it to play random music as I go about my day. It's like having the radio on, but with songs that I like, and no annoying dj.
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I use last.fm as Ballard described, just to record my listening habits. The only time I use it to listen to music is when I am at my mum's house, and as such, don't have my music collection with me. Even then, I normally don't, since I take my mp3 player almost everywhere.
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I don't listen to owt on it, I'm just obsessed with how much I listen to different people and different songs and different albums. I find it fascinating. Plus I wibble on abuot musical stuff no one cares about but me.
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Tommy, last.fm is for finding new music; it collects statistics of what tracks you listen to, and how often you listen to them. It compares your statistics to the statistics of other users. It then automatically finds people who have a similar taste in music to you. When you listen last.fm, it uses all these statistics to find bands that you might like, based on what it knows you listen to, and what it knows other people, who have a similar record collection to you, listen to.
Think of it as a radio station that your best friend runs. Sure, you're not going to like everything that is played, but chances are you will like some of it.
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Tommy, I have an iPod with about 20 gigs of music on it, all of which I love.
As I said before, I use Last.FM mainly to keep track of what I listen to in an organized manner. It's also a music social networking site, in a way. There's friends, private messages, shoutboxes, and whenever you visit someone's user page it compares your records and tells you how compatible your tastes in music are.
As a source for new music, I don't really bother with it. I have friends, indie blogs, and QC to find out about new music, and that's more than enough for me.
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CBS just bought the most effective viral marketing tool in the music industry. Won't be long before every other song is a band/artist on a label owned by CBS. Just like commercial radio basically.
So who else saw Last.fm being bought by a mega corporation coming?
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You are perfectly right being paranoid.
It's a corporation, shoving stuff down your throat is what they do.
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I'm not sure if that could happen without them changing the way the system works, since it only, currently, recommends bands that people with similar taste to you like. They'd have to change the way it works to make you listen to CBS backed bands frequently. If it was changed, I am guessing it would be a disaster and people would either figure out exploits to not have to listen to the CBS bands, or not use the radio altogether.
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CBS just paid US$280m in cash for this website.
Do you really think that they're just going to keep it the way it is?
I really hope I'm wrong on this one.
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I hope you're wrong too.
But you're probably not.
Although, since I don't really listen to the radio on Last.fm ever, it probably would not change too much for me.
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Well, you could argue that by not fucking with YouTube Google has provided a model of acquiring new methods of media in anticipation of a transition of the industry. What worries me more is that CBS also owns MTV, so the MTV mindset might slowly envelop last.fm and destroy everything that makes it great.
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Yeah, and seeing as Last.fm just added video features, something of that sort could be on the horizon.
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As I said before, I use Last.FM mainly to keep track of what I listen to in an organized manner. It's also a music social networking site, in a way. There's friends, private messages, shoutboxes, and whenever you visit someone's user page it compares your records and tells you how compatible your tastes in music are.
As a source for new music, I don't really bother with it. I have friends, indie blogs, and QC to find out about new music, and that's more than enough for me.
Yeah, same for me. I just love the stats, I don't really bother with the radio player. Hopefully this won't change the scrobbling aspect too much.
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lol Fender circa 1965
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Well, you could argue that by not fucking with YouTube Google has provided a model of acquiring new methods of media in anticipation of a transition of the industry. What worries me more is that CBS also owns MTV, so the MTV mindset might slowly envelop last.fm and destroy everything that makes it great.
Youre right about Google and Youtube, but Google is not a mega corporation like CBS is.
Although I dont have a Last.fm account, this worries me too. Chances are that it would probably happen.
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Google is not a mega corporation like CBS is.
Uhhhh... while it might not quite have reached Viacom levels yet, Google's pretty flipping huge at this point.
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I guess the most applicable comparison to make would be NewsCorp's buyout of MySpace. I didn't have a MySpace acount until after the buyout... How, if at all, did MySpace change after it was bought by NewsCorp, and is it applicable to Last.fm?
My knee-jerk reaction to this is to be outraged, but I'm actually trying to be optimistic that they won't fuck with it too much. I don't use it for the reccomendations anyway.
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I always thought Last.FM was useless...I hated the similar artists. I'm a little sad that everything is getting bought up...soon we will have just two companies owning everything but each other.
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While we're at it.
NewsCorp buys Photobucket (http://press.photobucket.com/blog/2007/05/important_photo.html)
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You're. fucking. kidding.
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Tommy, I have an iPod with about 20 gigs of music on it, all of which I love.
As I said before, I use Last.FM mainly to keep track of what I listen to in an organized manner. It's also a music social networking site, in a way. There's friends, private messages, shoutboxes, and whenever you visit someone's user page it compares your records and tells you how compatible your tastes in music are.
As a source for new music, I don't really bother with it. I have friends, indie blogs, and QC to find out about new music, and that's more than enough for me.
QFT.
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When google bought Youtube, they did actually change things. They took off a lot of videos because of copyrights, and all that jazz.
To my knowlodge, myspace didn't change much after the buyout. I just remember having a myspace before the buyout, and hating it, because I could never figure it out(don't ask), and then having one after the buyout that for some reason was easier to use.
I am going to be pissed if either Last.fm or Photobucket change. I can just imagine them putting in commercials between songs on Last.fm, and it basically becoming exactly like regular radio. Ugh.
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knowlodge
Like a library at a ski resort?
Awesome!
Totally.
Or you know, just possibly a typo. I prefer libraries at ski resorts, however.
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Something about community based websites being controlled by corporations makes me paranoid.
I wonder why.
Also, Storm (Totally forgot your name, sorry), as you can see Google did change some of the content on Youtube. What's stopping CBS from doing the same?
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I'm not saying that there isn't a distinct possibility that it will happen, I'm saying we shouldn't immediately jump to the conclusion that when a site is bought out the parent company will automatically ruin everything.
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I guess we'll wait and see.
Like I said, I really hope I'm wrong.
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Oh, balls.
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Nothing good can come of this. I am not looking forward to advertisments when I'm looking at my last.fm page.... It was such a nice community while it lasted.
Herein lies the question: What's next? MSNBC buy the Dumbrella forum? mIRC gets bought out by ESPN?
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I wouldn't use it myself but I understand the appeal.
Elaborate plz.
I wouldn't use it because I have an iPod which is entirely music I like. Am I missing the point of Last.FM?
Meh I don't really see the point. I listento music through my MP3 95% of the time so it would be pretty pointless for me to use.
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Last.fm has always been about the community aspects, for me anyway.
Addressing some points:
1) Advertising: last.fm already employed advertising for anyone who wasn't a subscriber.
2) Forcing music on people: utterly impossible without changing last.fm so fundamentally that it would lose all its appeal. The radio stations are built entirely on user-generated data, and quite a lot of people, myself included, only use radio stations generated by their own data.
3) Last.fm introduced video before the buy-out.
4) The Last.fm dev team still have managerial status. May just be on paper, but it gives me some confidence at least.
5) Why does Viacom have to change anything? Last.fm is already a profitable business. The only way to increase its profitability without changing its basic model is to spend money to advertise it and increase it's user base. The more users, the more data, the more data, the better the service.
6) Last.fm already had deals with most of the major labels.
My single worry is that Viacom may alter last.fms legendary 'anything goes' freedom of speech rules. Given that I run the largest anti-christian group on last.fm (also the largest religious group of any type on last.fm :)), and listen to quite a lot of controversial music, this obviously worries me. However, given that Viacom is an American company, operating under American freedom of speech laws, and the last.fm HQ will remain in London, I can't really see any legal basis. I also have simple moral objections because, hey, I don't like big business, and I am on reasonably good terms with a few members of the last.fm dev team. I would rather it stayed independent. However, I can honestly see this improving last.fms services. For example, perhaps now they will be able to cut their long-standing connection with the clunky and unreliable Musicbrainz database, and either develop their own band database or hook up with something like AMG (thus solving numerous problems, from minor annoyances like the countless capitalisation errors in band names and song names, to the more major ones, such as no differentiation between multiple bands with the same name.), and possibly acquire a larger catalogue of music for the radio. Of course, they may also face the problem of some more principled independent labels quitting, and as almost all the music I listen to is independent, that would possibly inconvenience me. I remain hopeful though, and will simply wait and see: I have until October to decide whether it is worth renewing my subscription.
And for those moaning about Youtube post-google...those videos were, no matter your take on copyright, illegal. In all other respects, youtubes service has increased spectacularly, (and vast amounts of copright material are still freely available) though there have been freedom of speech problems which make me nervous about last.fm. Still, wait and see.
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You know what? I'm going to be optimistic about this. I think that maybe CBS will provide a little funding for Last.fm to improve itself a little (like already mentioned, fixing that crap MusicBrainz that mistags all my properly tagged music when it's scrobbled) and then stay the fuck out if they know what's good for them.
It's unlikely, but it could happen. I think it will because that is the kind of day this is.
PS. I also used last.fm purely as an organizational/social tool. They keep recommending Sufjan, Elliott Smith, and Joanna Newsom to me....THE THREE ARTISTS THAT I CANNOT STAND...which leads me to believe that maybe their recommendations aren't so hot to begin with.
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Personally I doubt that this will change last.fm much itself. There'll be a few alterations and maybe some groups will be done away with but it'll most likely remain essentially the same. The massive advantage for CBS will probably come not from using last.fm itself as a marketing tool but by using it to provide huge amounts of data for their other marketing strategies. It's this accumulation of information which worries me, although I'm not going to get too excited over this one individual case of it. CCTV scares me far more.
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PS. I also used last.fm purely as an organizational/social tool. They keep recommending Sufjan, Elliott Smith, and Joanna Newsom to me....THE THREE ARTISTS THAT I CANNOT STAND...which leads me to believe that maybe their recommendations aren't so hot to begin with.
Yeah, the recommendations are hit or miss but make more sense than stuff like Pandora, because they're just based on what people with similar tastes listen to. So if you listen to some indie but dislike other stuff, it'll automatically recommend that other stuff anyway 'cos there's bound to be shitloads of people who listen to both.
I find the "similar artists" toolbar thingy on the left of bands' pages much more useful than the general LISTEN TO THIS recommendations on the main page :mrgreen:
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My single worry is that Viacom may alter last.fms legendary 'anything goes' freedom of speech rules. Given that I run the largest anti-christian group on last.fm (also the largest religious group of any type on last.fm :)), and listen to quite a lot of controversial music, this obviously worries me. However, given that Viacom is an American company, operating under American freedom of speech laws, and the last.fm HQ will remain in London, I can't really see any legal basis.
This all depends on how much Viacom chooses to get involved. If they choose to make any serious changes to Last.FM then your worries may not be unfounded. However, if they are only planning to use it as another source of revenue, then I doubt they will go so far as to fuck with users and groups. On the other hand, with the danger of intervention goes any chance at funding or improvements in Last.FM's future.
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It's not quite as simple as that. There have been grumblings for quite some time about legal issues based around the German last.fm site and fascistic or (more pertinently) presumed-fascistic music, ie, music that is banned in Germany. I'm most worried about logging on to last.fm one day and finding that Burzum, Death in June, Blood Axis, NON, The Count Nosferatu Kommando and fuck knows what else have been wiped off my charts and blocked from being scrobbled, or that playing and recommending them has been disabled and their wikis and band pictures wiped.
Last.fm have so far been telling the ANL and AFA to go fuck themselves, because they support freedom, but a larger company may err on the side of caution if any actual legal action is bought and, whilst it may not be that severe, I know for a fact that at least one of my favourite albums (Rose Clouds of Holocaust) is banned under the same rules (section 86a of the German constitution) that ban Wolfenstein 3D.
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never did the last.fm thing.................................... now i have a reason to.
just kidding. now i know that i have a reason to never even consider it ever again.
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I think Khar's hit the nail on the head wrt why this shouldn't be a big deal... we'll see.
I keep thinking I should stop scrobbling - seems pretty pointless and sometimes knowing stuff is being uploaded actually influences what I listen to, which is just too lame to even want to admit to - but then every time someone contacts me through a PM or whatever and I make some cool little connection and either discover some new music or talk some shit with someone new... basically it suddenly turns ace again.
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To me, those little things are what makes it worth signing on, if only once in a blue moon.
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what do they actually show on CBS?, I mean last time I check is was nothing but "Everybody loves Raymond".
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Well, you could argue that by not fucking with YouTube Google has provided a model of acquiring new methods of media in anticipation of a transition of the industry. What worries me more is that CBS also owns MTV, so the MTV mindset might slowly envelop last.fm and destroy everything that makes it great.
not fuck with it? it isn't a coincidence that all the music videos, AMVs, etc. started getting deleted around the time Google acquired it...
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Reading this thread, I decided to go out, buy the world's tiniest violin and learn how to play "American Pie" on it - just for you, thread!
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You mean all the things that were violating copyright law? Well hot damn, who would have thought?
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^ precisely. All last.fms content, on the other hand, is 100% legal.
I'd also maybe point out that about 70% of everything on youtube is still illegal.
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Is it just my hard luck or has the last.fm player become a lot slower and more needy of constant buffering since the takeover?
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That probably has absolutely nothing to do with the purchase. CBS most likely will not mess with the technology behind Last.fm, just the content (if they do mess with anything).
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Nothing. Will. Change.
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...your mother changed
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*gasp!* :-o
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LAST.FM. LAST.FM NEVER CHANGES.
(http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/5782/060512pipboyyp8.jpg)