April 12 Site Update - track page beta, streaming changes

it's really better =)

Have been offline for 3 weeks whilst rebuilding my OS. Thought I was going mad when I couldn't find the 'full track' listening function. The inpage 30 second preview is good and the links to other scrobblers probably sensible - but personally, as an 'old git', I just want to listen to the full tracks that might be available free, online and on page, without being transferred to another site. Please bring back your own streaming video, streaming music and player. Perhaps these can be check boxes on one's profile settings that can load a personalised page when logging on? For now I will only use the 'radio' or search for another provider. Shame - as I have been with Last.fm for several years

I can't really see what's the advantage of deleting the 'full track listening' funktion. (For the user that is) I've put about 80 songs into lastfm all of them downloadable only to find that you've reduced them to insignificant snippets. This may be okay for well-known musicians but fatal for unknown artists or groups. Just listening to a 30 second preview won't do their work any justice and I can't see anyone downloading a lot of songs from an unknown artist.
If you were really interested in supporting active listeners you'd install a player with a scrolling function so that the listener can decide which parts of a song he wants to listen to.

Studley, et. al., you're not getting it.

Babs ~ dear friend ~ you're not getting it.

ZodRau ~ is right on the money. (comment above)


Sad ~ very sad about yanking full-track streaming. This has also served to practically eliminate sharing of songs AND alienate many, many listeners.

Gee, now that this site is so screwed up, maybe CBS will to sell it to someone who cares about their listeners.

(Hmmm ~ how do ya sell a bad product?)

[spam]

[spam]

I have an issue.
I was just playing my loved tracks via LFM radio. The titles only show up on my browser ~ nowhere else. Is there a particular reason for this? (I can't share something that I cannot identify) Thank you.

OLdSKuul62 said:
Is there a way to delete banned friends? Or do they automatically get deleted during an update ?You can drop any friends you like (or rather you don't like) by going to your friends list and clicking the little x icon that appears when you hover over them. Or are you asking for a way to automatically drop all banned friends?

OLdSKuul62 said:
1) Would it be possible to have a button that would toggle our libraries from most played to alphabetical order ? I would find that to be extremely usefull.But there is. When you open your (or in fact any user's) library, there is a link labelled A-Z in the top right corner. You can even sort them by the date when you added them to your library.

OLdSKuul62 said:
2) Some type of counter next to the inbox for number of shouts and friend requestsSeconded. I already posted this in the suggestions discussion.

Sinsinatti said:
I just want ask-can you make that listened tracks and artists not replaced in the wrong name??? Every time I send to repair to correct name but nothing happens.You can switch off Auto-Correct in your website settings. If you want to help and improve Auto-Correct, join The Auto-Correct Correction Brigade. They will also help you with voting for the correct band names and song titles.

thisisall1word said:
OK - this is one example of how I used to roll and me coming up against a bit of frustration and then getting a happy ending (although this'll play out different for other artists)...

[...]

This post has got far longer than I hoped it would. Sorry. But to summarise; last.fm doesn't do everything I want it to do. But what it's starting to do is tell me where to find the sources for the things I want. I get to listen to what I want now and watch the snooker at the same time. I am a happy user, for today, at least.Thank you for this nicely detailed account of your recent interaction with last.fm - I find such accounts quite useful as they put the arguments put forth regarding recent changes in local on-demand full-length track streaming in perspective.

And success stories are good to hear - it's far too easy to get caught up in the discontentment that a de facto loss of functionality at last.fm entails to those that depended on said functionality for their music exploration - I chose to call the manual browsing of artist and listener pages and the subsequent discovery of new music through on-demand playback of music as exploration previously on this thread, so I will continue to do so in this message.

I personally reckon that it remains to be seen whether last.fm will retain its utility and relevance to a segment of its users in regards to music exploration, who have found the shuffled/related-artist radio mode of full-length playback to not lead to satisfying experiences and results. I haven't made up my mind in this regard myself yet, but I enjoyed reading thisisall1word's account of how this combination of last.fm and Spotify recently did work for him. I figure I could have a similar interaction between last.fm and MOG over here in the US.

That is a pretty big problem right there - the regional restrictions to music availability. I'm pretty sure that M83's catalog is available to equal extents on Spotify and MOG, but mileage WILL necessarily vary depending on the artists in question. Yes, Spotify is expected to become available here in the US later this year - seeing as how the US market is somewhere around 3 times the combined size of all the markets Spotify is available in presently (I didn't do the math very precisely, so please excuse me if I got it wrong) that is to be expected and I'm fortunate to be living in a geographically privileged segment of last.fm's listenership.

That doesn't mean I'll refrain from lamenting this continued regionalization of the online on-demand full-length streaming market, though I fully understand that this of course isn't last.fm's or CBS' fault (heck, last.fm had been part of this regionalization all along due to the complexities of licensing restrictions.)

So with all this talk of "the cloud", I'm crossing my fingers that a future instance of this supposedly all-encompassing cloud of media will extend in reach beyond those of us fortunate enough to live in a major market. Ah, crossing fingers - blessed are the hopefuls and the optimists, eh? ;-)

Babs_05 said:
CrybKeeper said:
ModsSuck said:
Ban my IP? that won't work, i have thousands available. Feel helpless now Mod?

You're not only harrassing the moderators; you are hurting the entire community and damaging the validity of all feedback from us. Why would you be so obsessed, with destroying everyones LFM experience?

That person is sending nasty PMs too. Just got one. Cyberbullying and stalking.

I think this person doesn't actually understand:

Any dynamic IP addresses, can be traced back to the source and will eventually be reported to local law enforcement for harrasment and your ISP provider, will shut down your entire internet connection.

If I were a moderator, I would send this person a PM, containing their name, address and service provider, with a very final warning ; )

(EDIT)

P.S. Save those PM's Babs ; ) Anyone else being harrassed and bullied by this person, also save the PM's and copy the shouts. Those can be viewed by the correct LastFM staff member as time stamped evidence ; )

So about this Play direct from artist concession that last.fm has made and has suggested will be implemented as soon as can be managed - perhaps by the third week of May (perhaps we should all be crossing our fingers and/or send the developer folks at last.fm prepaid pizza deliveries to help things along?)

This is a good thing and I'm hoping for it to go a ways towards making last.fm more useful for my personal music exploration once again. I was pleased with the announcement of this. Never mind the bait-and-switch and the PR maneuver theories expressed elsewhere - I'm not completely discounting them, but that might not be the most helpful tactic in stating ones position and desires. And of course on-demand full-length streaming would be richer if it weren't restricted to royalty-free, promotional content, but heck, this new/old facility will give any one artist or label with the rights to waive royalty entitlements to particular content the ability to once again offer on-demand full-length streaming content on last.fm. I'll take that.

Maybe some majors might choose to make individual promotional tracks of their artists available here on last.fm for limited amounts of time again? That would be nice. A recent fore ray into a last.fm featured artist (major label, of course) that bounced me right over to some CBS streaming radio thing did not fit my idea of an effective artist-feature. After over 10 minutes of unrelated artists, commercials, and who knows what else (I'm not a radio listener so my attention span was waning considerably once the third song played had preciously little to do with the featured artist) there was a talky bit about the featured artist and one featured track. Sheesh. But you radio-lovers - knock yourselves out, please do ;-)

And I certainly hope that last.fm will roll this out with all the previously uploaded content that fits this royalty-waived criterion available under the Play direct from artist immediately and without any modifications to the content necessary on the part of the rights-holders.

The jury is still out on this and as far as I know last.fm has not made a clear statement in this matter, so I'm putting this out there for the third time, because...maybe I am a hopeless optimist that thinks sooner or later questions are acknowledged and answered, even when this occurs in as comparatively chaotic setting such as this. Because I hope statements such as "In the meantime, keep it coming." imply that some folks that could possibly be addressing this issue might be reading this ;-)