Upon logging into last.fm today I was greeted with a rather pleasant surprise. last.fm rolled out several new features for their website today including a new version of the radio used on their website which they have dubbed "Visual Radio", the ability to play combinations of tag radios, improved station history tracking, and a new "in your library" station. Although they are doing their best to heavily promote the new visual radio section, mainly because they will be selling advertising space on it, I believe the most exciting new feature is the ability to play combinations of tag and artist radio stations. It seems as if last.fm just increased the potential for discovering new music a great deal with this new feature. Here is a rundown of the new features:
Personalized Visual Radio In Action
Personalized Visual Radio
The feature that last.fm is touting the most is the personalized visual radio, although I find this to be the least interesting development considering I very rarely use the web radio player. The reason they are promoting this over the other features is because they plan to sell part of the space to advertisers and sponsors. The visual radio is a major improvement to the previous web player, featuring a sleek new interface. They have also added a slideshow which appears while a visitor is listening to the web radio. The slideshow showcases both video and images uploaded by the last.fm community. Unfortunately these aesthetic improvements come with a price, as they have done away with the album art and info that was previously displayed, coupled with the fact that they plan to use this space to display adverts.
Combo Stations
This is easily the most exciting new feature to be implemented by last.fm in quite some time. The addition of "combo stations" is something that many last.fm users have been requesting since the birth of last.fm/audioscrobbler. I tried several combinations of tags which didn't yield any results, despite the fact that I know of bands which could have been returned in the results, so there is definitely room for improvement as far as this feature is concerned. Fortunately the content of both the similar artists and tag radio stations is generated by the listening habits of last.fm users, and the results for combo stations will improve as this feature is used more often. At the moment combo stations can only be listened to via the web radio, but word has it that this functionality will be implemented in the desktop client soon.
Improved Station History:
last.fm has expanded upon it's "recent stations" module to create a much longer list, and has also added the ability to remove unwanted stations from your history. This feature was added a few months ago, and it keeps track of all the tag, user, artist, and group radio stations that a user listens to. The most recently listened station will automatically rise to the top of the list. They also recently worked this into the latest version of the last.fm software, which was a very smart move in my opinion.
Additional Minor Changes:
The most obvious features have already been mentioned, but last.fm also made a few less obvious changes. The newly added "in your library" displays statistics related the currently playing artist, along with a graph that shows the frequency at which the artist is listened to. They have also added a scrobble toggle, which gives users the option to turn scrobbling on and off with ease, and allowing one to listen to music without any data being transmitted to last.fm.
The Future of last.fm
The future of last.fm is still very much in doubt. The recent decision to require members outside of the US, UK, and Germany to pay a subscription fee to be able to use the radio has generated an enormous amount of negative feedback and publicity. A mass migration has already started, and will no doubt continue as members who are unwilling to pay the fee make the move to competitors such as Spotify.
Up until this point last.fm has dominated the niche of social networking for music, but with all the recent negative publicity and competitors popping up left and right, it's easy to believe that last.fm is slowly but surely losing the firm grip it once held. They are no doubt feeling the pressure to convince current members to stick with them and subscribe rather than leaving for upstart services such as Spotify, which is one reason they are rolling out updates such as this one. While competition may hurt last.fm, it is definitely beneficial to the rest of us, as it forces them to improve their service in order to be profitable, or be left behind as their competitors are able to fulfill the needs of the people.
Later this week I will be reviewing a number of different alternatives to last.fm. If you are aware of a worthy last.fm alternative, please leave a comment and let us know about it. I would also like to hear your opinions concerning the future of last.fm and their recent business decisions, so please leave a comment and let your opinion be counted.
