With record sale slumps at major labels and the closing or reformatting of dozens of radio stations, the future of the music industry seems to have shifted toward the Internet. This is where the website Last.fm is quickly becoming a darling to music-savvy net surfers, with more than 1.5 million registered users.
Founded in early 2003, Last.fm is the marriage of two separate programs, the Last.fm website and the media plug-in Audioscribbler. The overall website can be described as "a two-sided coin of the music consumer and music promotion," said Martin Stiksel, one of the founders of Last.fm. "We needed a new way to promote unknown artists and to connect music to the right ears."
The Audioscribbler program connects to a user's music player, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player, and records the name and artist of each song as well as the number of times each song is played. This information is then organized and displayed on the user's Last.fm profile. Additionally, the user is connected to other users who have similar listening patterns, called "neighbors," and to several personalized streaming radio stations.
"It's a social network based on music," Stiksel said. "Instead of having a top-down approach with editors in place telling people what to listen to, we have something fundamentally different and more bottom-up. It's basically the difference between a dictatorship and democracy."
Many Duke students are long-established fans of the site.
"I've been using the site since early 2004," said freshman Spike Brehm. "I like charting my own usage and seeing what I like a lot and what my friends are listening to. I also like looking at neighbors and finding new music."
Other students have just recently been introduced to Last.fm. This semester Assistant Professor Jeffrey Forbes' Computer Science 1 class has been using Last.fm as one of its ongoing projects.
"We're using Last.fm to track listening habits-it's an iPod class-and use those listening habits as a case study for recommender systems," Forbes said. "I do think this project could be very fruitful in the future, both in terms of being a good way to teach the material about recommender systems and social networks and as a way of showing some of the more interesting applications of computer science."
The students' reactions have also generally been favorable to the project. "It's pretty cool, considering it's for a class," said sophomore Courtney Cole-Lovelace. "I like seeing all the music I listen to and what everyone else in the class is listening to."
Last.fm is hoping that reactions like Cole-Lovelace's will become the norm as it attempts to expand and attract an even larger range of users.
"Right now the music industry is stuck between a rock and a hard place," Stiksel said. "They're hoping their problems will go away by looking the other way. iTunes has demonstrated there is a future in digital music. The industry needs to come to embrace new systems like us."
With its ability to track the combined top artists and songs of all its users, it has been suggested that Last.fm has the potential to replace traditional music charts. Currently, charts, such as Billboard, rank artists and songs based on units sold per week.
But some are skeptical of this happening in the near future.
"It can't necessarily replace traditional charts because not everyone uses the Internet like that now," Brehm said.
But if Last.fm continues in its exponential growth, the music industry could rely on it as an important marketing tool.
"The labels need to reposition themselves," Stiksel said. "The label is for marketing and packaging, not producing anymore. Anybody can make their own music in their basement these days. Now they need to make interest in products, something interesting to own."
The word-of-mouth buzz created by Last.fm could be just the thing to help the music industry get back on its feet.
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