Last.fmhas one feature that is keeping it going: personal charts, radio and recommendations that are the results of years of scrobbling in some cases: glorious heaven for all the statistic loving music nerds around the world.
Yet somewhere along the line, Last.fm forgot how to be exciting, social and even how to be a proper tool for musicians. I fear now Last.fm is heading in a similar direction asMyspacehas been for the past year: oblivion. Many people do have a Last.fm account, but what percent (still) deems it an essential part of their online experience? Who still uses it for anything but scrobbling (and possibly listening)?
Last.fm missed the train to essentialville. Which is a shame. A lot of people still go to Myspace for the music player and bands know this, thus they still use Myspace. Facebook has its own music player and it’s a matter of time until the majority switches. Likewise, people still use Last.fm because of the scrobbling music feature and personal radio. But like Myspace isn’t going to survive because of the music player, it is only a matter of time before Last.fm is replaced. For Last.fm to grow and survive, it needs to evolve and it needs to evolve fast.
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Here’s 5 ways:
SinceCBS acquired Last.fm, the music network should be upping their game, not continue acting as if it is the next indie website on the block. There was a time when people were proud to become a subscriber for a couple of euros per month. Those times have gone and people have been falling out of love with the website sincechanges to the subscription planwere made and listening to music became a paid feature in most countries. Since then, the website has been acting surprisingly traditional for what is supposed to be a hip and happening website. The result: it is no longer hip and happening and besides the scrobbling and streaming features the website is lacking in many ways. And there will be other websites like that. One of these days, either Spotify or another competitor will improve their radio features and that could be the final blow for Last.fm. And when that happens, Last.fm won’t last much longer.
Story byStefan Meeuws
Stefan Meeuws is a IT journalist from Nijmegen (NL) and works as an online producer and editor for ZB Communicatie & Media. He has a pe(show all)Stefan Meeuws is a IT journalist from Nijmegen (NL) and works as an online producer and editor forZB Communicatie & Media. He has apersonal websiteand spends too much time on social networks likeTwitter.
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