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Last.fm – the Blog

Music and Web Geekery from East London


Last.fm iPhone 2.0September 27

Back in July we launched Last.fm on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It was the end result of months of hard work and we were pretty happy with how it turned out. We received tons of positive feedback and although we weren’t able to launch in every country, we were able to provide an excellent streaming solution in more markets than any of the other iPhone players.

Fast forward 3 months… Apple released the iPhone 2.1 firmware which was unfortunately incompatible with the bleeding edge coding techniques cooked into our app. Fortunately, we have been feverishly working on the next generation app that also happens to be 2.1 firmware friendly. Team iPhone have once again outdone themselves to produce what quite frankly, is a work of art (check out the tagging interface if you doubt).

There’s been some awesomely high profile internet leakage of beta test footage, but below you can see the version that’s available right now from the iTunes App Store:


Here’s the feature breakdown:

  • VASTLY improved user interface all around (tap to zoom album art included)
  • Ability to tag songs
  • Personal tag radio
  • Calendar based events view
  • Common artists when viewing a user profile
  • Many other usability and back-end f

Rockband 2 RadioAugust 22

Today we are pleased to announce a cool partner integration with Gamespot for their Rockband 2 launch center. Gamespot has setup Last.fm radio with the ability to play songs from the game (so you can start getting warmed up :). They will be updating their station with new songs that show up in weekly download section of Rockband 2.

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This is a great example of the type of partner integration that we’ve been working to deliver. You should start to see more Last.fm players across the web (they’ll scrobble if you’re logged in). If you’re a website that’s interested in using a Last.fm radio, please email box@last.fm.

Quality ControlAugust 1

[Suggested listening while reading this post: Quality Control – Jurassic 5]

Prior to moving to London to join Last.fm I worked on credit card software for a leading international bank. When it comes to dealing with people’s money there isn’t much room for mistakes and buggy code can have major consequences. For these reasons there were a number of processes and systems in place to reduce the likelihood of software errors.

Despite what some of our more critical users may think, we do actually have a number of similar systems (and some novel additions) in place at Last.fm. We use software like Cacti, Ganglia, Nagios and JMX to monitor many aspects of our running infrastructure and the results are made available in a number of ways – from coloured graphs to arcanely-formatted log files. So much information is churned out that one could easily spend all day just looking at all the output until one’s mind buckled under the data overload. For this reason we selectively take the most vital data (things like database load, web request times, uptime status of core machines) and display these on eye-catching displays in our operations room.

Last.fm: The Next GenerationJuly 17

Back in May we unveiled our project to build a new version of Last.fm. Our goal was to lay the foundation for an online music experience more compelling, accessible, and discoverable than anything that had gone before.

But modernising a service powered by the people since 2002—touching on everything from the core of Audioscrobbler engine to the look & feel—wasn’t something we could do alone.

So we turned to you—Last.fm subscribers and users—and wow, you sure came through. Here’s a look at the past eight weeks of beta testing:

We’ve been listening hard, trying out new ideas, and making tons of changes in response to your feedback. Today we’ve taken the n

Last.fm for iPhone and iPod TouchJuly 13

We are pleased to announce the launch of Last.fm on the iPhone and iPod Touch! Sam Steele, our iPhone development army of one, has been cranking away at a full blown Last.fm app on Apple’s mobile platforms for months now and the results are nothing short of insanely great.

Read on for details, but this video speaks for itself.


Last.fm iPhone Demo from Toby on Vimeo.

To get started, go to the music category of the iTunes App store (in iTunes or on your iPhone/Touch). Find the Last.fm app and download it (for free).

Log in or signup to Last.fm and you’ll be presented with a fairly obvious selection of Last.fm functionality. Things with the red circle icon start streaming. You can navigate through the menus and go back with the button in the upper left.

Once you start streaming something, you’ll have access to the familiar Last.fm contextual items (love, ban, skip… tagging will be in the next version). You can also check out the artist bio, similar artists and events (particularly cool). If there are current events for the now playing artists, you can specify if you’re attending or not and go to a Google map for the event location.

There’s a lot you can do in this a