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Music and Web Geekery from East London

Hack Day 2008December 22 2008

A week or so ago, on Sunday 14th December, we held our first open Hack Day, giving developers a chance to show off what they could build in a day with nothing but their wits and the Last.fm API.

At around 10:30, the hungry and cold developers started pouring into Corbet Place, behind Brick Lane in the heart of East London. With free food and drink behind the bar, plenty of comfy sofas to drape themselves over, and a Surface table with which to amuse themselves, the hackers dug in. (Sorry you guys had to wait in the cold for longer than we’d hoped, that sucked.)

By 6:30, and in spite of wifi woes throughout the day, we had 30 quick fire demos lined up to wow the assembled crowd of geeks. As anyone who’s run an event like this will attest, getting 30 odd laptops hooked up to 2 projector adaptors on rotation with a 2 minute turnaround is no mean feat, but no one was trampled underfoot and only one person outright gave up (apologies Steve!).

Amongst our favourite hacks were Bret Ehlert’s Nostalg

Last.fm on the SonosDecember 21 2008

We’ve been going gadget crazy for last couple of months, as we work towards bringing you the Last.fm experience not just on your desktop but wherever you are able to listen to music.

We’re especially excited about partnering with Sonos to bring streaming and scrobbling to their Multi-Room Music Systems. Sonos devices are great for streaming your digital music in different rooms throughout your house, and last month we integrated Last.fm streaming radio (in the US, UK and Germany) and scrobbling (everywhere) into the service. There’s also now a slick Sonos iPhone app allowing you to control your music straight from your phone – and you know how much we love iPhone apps.

In other gadget news: we’re part of the new 3 INQ1 social phone you can now get similar artist recommendations on T-Mobile phones and just this week we launched a scrobbling app for Vodafone mobiles. And last but not least – check us out on the Gadget Show on Channel Five in the UK!.

Last.fm Best of 2008December 3 2008

While other annual retrospectives are based on editors’ picks or sales data, the Last.fm Best of 2008 list is based entirely on what the Last.fm community has been listening to this year and shows which artist, albums and tracks defined the musical landscape in 2008.

We compiled the list by looking at the data in a number of different ways to get a full picture of what you all listened to this year. First we looked at absolute numbers. It won’t surprise any followers of the Last.fm weekly charts to know that Coldplay, Radiohead and The Beatles topped the list. While Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends” certainly made an impact this year, many of the other artists had not released any new material, and we wanted to know what artists really made 2008 different. So, we decided to slice the data to show us which new artists really broke through this year. We chose to define “new” artists as artists who released their debut full-length album in 2008 in the UK, and we ranked them by total number of listeners. Check out who made the top ten here.

Next we looked at the top albums by scrobbles in 2008. When looking at all scrobbles in 2008

Hack DayNovember 26 2008

Back in June when we announced our new API, we were bowled over with the positive response. Hundreds of developers have been engaged in discussions over in our Web Services Group, building API bindings for Python, PHP, Actionscript, Java and other languages along the way.

Some of my favourite apps built on the Last.fm platform include Andrew Godwin’s Lastgraph, Chris Mear and James Darling’s Vinyl Scrobbler and Jorge Diaz’s One Hit Wonders. That’s just a small sample of the apps available at our gallery.

We thought it was about time to bring some of the dev community together in East London for a hack day. So here it is: The first Last.fm Hack Day, on Sunday 14th December. There’s only 150 places available and it’s first come first served. We kick off at 10AM and we have a great live act playing last thing in the evening to wash down the code. Last.fm developers will be available on the day to answer API

Simplify 1.2 for iPhone ScrobblesNovember 24 2008

Just a quick note for those of you with an iPhone. Our friends at Simplify Media have just released a new version of their iPhone app that includes Scrobbling and more in-depth Last.fm support. You can read about the release on their blog.

Simplify provides a very cool way to stream music from your home collection to a variety of clients including the iPhone. It’s the perfect complement to the official Last.fm iPhone app and quite popular at the Last.fm HQ :) Great work guys!