Last.fm is a social music service that consists of two components: A player and something they call the “audioscrobbler”. The latter is a plug-in for iTunes that sends every song you play to a last.fm server to create a musical profile of every user, given she has installed the audioscrobbler software. Last.fm uses this data to infer what bands you would like to listen to when you’re using their player, with which you can create “stations” by indicating a band’s or a song’s name.
Today, Kristin was listening to it and got pretty frustrated.
She likes Eva Cassidy, but the results that last.fm obtained didn’t match her music taste at all.
I had mixed experiences with it: For some band names it would give me exaclty what I expected and even introduced me to some new bands. E. g. when I tried it with the Arctic Monkeys, the obtained results were quiet good. But the group of people that listen to this band usually share my taste of music, so it wasn’t much of a suprise to get other UK Indie bands like “Maximo Park” or the “Babyshambles”. However, this is much different with another band I like, which is, other than the bands listed above, basically a ubiquitous favourite, namely The Beatles. Listening to a last.fm Beatles station yields interesting insights into the way this system works: The first song I got was some classical piano track by Beethoven - not that I don’t enjoy this from time to time, but what I actually wanted to get was stuff like The Kinks, The Byrds and related 60s Beat sound. The problem is that almost everyone listens to The Beatles from time to time, including Gangsta-Hip-Hoppers and opera nerds. The same might be true for some less known artists like Eva Cassidy and the result is, that last.fm gives you random radio, which isn’t what it meant to be.
I just found this post of Marcus Whitney who got frustrated with last.fm due to a somewhat related reason:

Last FM has no quality control

Listening to tagged stations on LiveFM is pretty frustrating. I’ve been listening to ‘hip hop’ today and half of the songs are not hip hop at all. They have been rock, alternative and other weird stuff. This is going to be the death of LastFM if they can’t figure out a way to determine if a ‘genre’ tag like hip hop is being tagged inappropriately. I’m on my last leg with it.
I’ll still use the audioscrobbler technology though.

Now this might be a different issue, though in fact I believe it is the very same underlying problem of last.fm and many other social applications: It’s the pee in the beer-problem I’ve been blogging about before. And Marcus Whitney is right, services like last.fm are doomed to fail if they aren’t able to solve this problem. Now what’s the solution? Hire hundreds of people to build a “Tag-Watch” and let them decide which tags are approbriate and which not? Put it onto the mechanical turk? I don’t think so. Noone would like to have his or her tags censored.
What services like last.fm need, is a system that enables users to build trusted networks, i.e. to choose which other users they find reliable and who they know of that they tag responsible and reliable. Such a system will become more and more important as their user base grows and I don’t think there is an satisfactory alternative to that.

In fact, they already have something that somewhat similar to the kind of system that I am proposing, though less powerful: One can choose to listen to a radio station that only plays songs from a certain user profile. I thought this was a very cool feature, until I found a very disappointing flaw - To listen to such a “personal station”, you have to pay last.fm some fee around a few dollars. I am not the kind of person that categorically refuses to pay for internet services, but with last.fm I feel like I am paying twice, because they already got something very valuable from me: I am using their “Audioscrobbler” to upload MyWare, in this case, my taste of music as an iTunes “clickstream”.
Can’t they find a way to monetize this? I think this would be a fair deal: I’d give up part of my privacy and in return would get a nice social music service. In my opinion, this is how things should work online.

technorati tags: last.fm , social, web2.0, myware ,

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