How did Last.fm drop the ball and allow Songkick to flourish?
Songkick seems to be the most reliable source now for finding out about gigs in a large number of places worldwide. To me, their site seems clunky and unintuitive, though their synchronisation with other sites is pretty impressive.
Last.fm have been doing exactly the same thing for a hell of a lot longer, and their events management seems to be just as bad, but by allowing anyone to add an event instantly, they were the go-to source.
I always think Last.fm is such a useful tool, with a wealth of listening data from a huge number of users, but to me it seems like there's so much more they could do but never have. I'm guessing it's when CBS Interactive bought it that it went wrong, but don't have a clue really.
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dont think i've ever had an email
from Lastfm advising me of gigs?
The songkick app on spotify ruins me, went to so many gigs last year as it emails you gig announcement for bands you are listening to, never used the website just browsed through the spotify app
to be honest i'd forgotten i had lastfm, only realised last week its been plugged into my spotify account for the last couple of years scrobbling which is cool
Another example of a simple thing they never took advantage of
I use Ents24 for alerts. Nothing better than getting a "Your favourite band just announced a date in the city you live in, motherfucker" email in your inbox!
the decline of last.fm is pretty tragic
there's so much potential there but it seems as if the developers have abandoned it entirely. The new scrobbler upgrade is terrible. Why they produced that after years of leaving well alone is bizarre. That's just the start.
What have they done to the scrobbler?
Seems to be working just the same as ever for me.
it works
it just looks horrible. The list of scrobbles is spaced really widely instead of a neat compact list, and it doesn't even tell you all of them - probably because they've made the spacing far too big to ever fit it all into anything. Just stupid of them.
The desktop app thingy is all big pictures too. Why does everything have to look like an over-inflated cartoon? That's more personal preference though, I like things sleek and serious looking.
...
Wait. The fact that you don't like how the program looks is you're reason for it declining?
not directly no
but they have also got the shade of red wrong. I meant that it illustrates their inattentiveness to it. They could be doing a lot more, something like Steinbolt says below - being able to run more detailed stats would be fun. Like, what day of the week do I most frequently listen to artist X.
They could fix the Groups stats so they actually work.
Post to social media FB/Twitter/Tumblr when you love tracks.
Have more to the Friends Activities section; showing their recent comments, journal entries, events listings etc, no just what they're currently listening to or what they've loved. That could all be bumped onto social media sites too.
Things like that all seem quite basic now. It's a bit passive. they would get people using it more regularly or by feeding out to Facebook etc, get themselves involved more.
They've got some good bits. I've always liked how the tagging in journal entries works, posting them to the artist's pages. The events listings are good - debatable, as seen in the posts below, but I really like it. When I used to go out a lot that was my diary.
All that is why I think they're in decline, not just the aesthetics.
I take some of that back
they have apps you can use that do some of the stuff I mentioned. But they should just have done it themselves!
songkick notifies me
based on my last.fm account
...I think?
Agree with the above.
SongKick send me an email telling me when folk are playing and that's just dandy.
For some reason I always found Last FM kind of depressing.
Advantages of last.fm
More social: make friends, see what they listen to. Post comments on event pages (good for face-value resale of tickets).
See your listening data, obviously. (I am approaching 100,000 plays!!!!!)
Use as a discovery tool for new music.
You can't do any of those on Spotify, so I find them both useful.
I find some of the 'similar artists' list on spotify useful for new music
Ah, I'm dumb
I meant "can't do those on Songkick", not "on Spotify". I agree, the 'similar artists' on Spotify is useful.
Got it
Should've realised that's what you meant in a thread about last.fm and songkick.
I wish you could do more with last fm
I like how it has everything I listened to on mp3 since around 2004 (and some teenagers presumably everything they have ever listened to ever), but I'd like to be able to break it down even more. Maybe top track played on a Friday night? Or top album played from a particular year? Otherwise I am just looking at who I listened to the most in the last x amount of time.
The new iPod scrobbler
Is pretty alright actually. It has a little "On tour" notification there when you play a specific artist that you can click on and find out that they are playing one festival in the states or whatever and get somewhat disappointed!
So yeah, agree with general point, if you could customise it so that it only notified artists as "On tour" when they were in your country and so on it could be a heck of a lot more useful.
I still like it overall though, and some of its recommendations are winners (I discovered Lindstrom recently through them).
No idea what Songkick is.
I know last.fm well.
Therefore I conclude Last.FM is still the more important service.
Oh come on.
There's no way that's true.
I fail to believe that a music fan, from a music website, who also uses LastFM and Spotify, doesn't know what Songkick is.
I've heard of it.
I just don't know what it actually is.
I had ceased going to loads and loads of gigs a fair few years back.
I've only ever seen Last.FM as a tool for recording statistics about what I listen to.
Bit ignorant, mate.
i'm going to get the new scrobbler tonight
It hasn't been reliable for me for years, it actually annoys me quite a bit. Hope i have success with the new one
So i just tried the iPod scrobble for the new version (which caused me most problems)
It seemed good when a huge list came up, but then over half were red and couldn't be selected. Why show them if they can't be read...I don't understand. Anyway, will remember my listening until tomorrow night and then test it again.
scrobbling all my plays seems to be a fading thing for me of late
since I've been driving to work instead of taking the train.
but in lieu of a thisismyjam app, i've been enjoying the last.fm recommended/neighbour radio thing lately.
soundcloud seemed to have detached itself from last.fm last time i logged in (didn't have a sync with last.fm option anymore, iirc), and the interface felt naff. but they send me emails of stuff that's on, which i add to my gig list in last.fm, which syncs to my google calendar, which is handy to have alongside my other calendar stuff on my phone.
one thing that should exist is a last.fm app for ps3 so i can scrobble my cd plays. i guess sony have their vidzone app thing and see it as competition. but i thought CBS were linked to/owned by sony?
Proprietary nonsense and rights squabbles are lame.
did last.fm ever tell you about good gigs?
maybe I wasn't working it right
Events>Recommended
You can subscribe to them, but it's certainly not as slick or user-friendly as Songkick.
Really? I've just been on Songkick for the first time and I can't work it out at all
Or, if I can, then it's shit. Do you really have to either a) wade through all the hundreds of gigs happening in London every night, or b) go through and manually add every band you may be interested in seeing and then you still only get told about *them* and not other bands you may like? Last.fm gives me recommendations that actually interest me without me having to do anything myself.
You need to import artists
On the right hand of the home screen you can import all your iTunes artists, or last.fm, or Pandora or Spotify. You can also manually add or delete them.
songkick
should be able to automatically track your favourite last.fm artists, and/or most (all?) things in your music player. Although you might get a whole heap of bands you're not that fussed about.
I think that's how it works, although it's been a while since I set up an account, and now I just individually add new bands I come across.
Songkick used to be a lot better though - you could easily check other friends' gigs, see how many times you had seen a particular band or how many times you had been to a particular venue. For some reason they took away these options a while ago.
It is amazing
How they had all these great (if underdeveloped) features for finding out about upcoming gigs, and it really looked like they were going to become to only place I ever needed to look to find out about gigs I wanted to go to. Then one day all the useful features just disappeared and they added a blog post saying "we've removed them so we can rebuild from the ground up - they'll be back!". That was a year and a half ago.
does songkick still include links to touting sites?
Songkick isn't all that.
It doesn't serve any purpose beyond gig alerts and it's a little bit clumsy. Not only that, but you do have to click on individual artists in order to receive concert alerts. The import of last.fm data just doesn't work anymore and hasn't done for months. Last.fm is far superior and recent changes have only served to benefit what is already an essential site/tool for music lovers.
yeah i was going to say, songkick doesn't import last.fm data at all
i didn't realise, and suddenly found out the other week that loads of gigs by new bands I like had been announced, but songkick hadn't told me about them! It is really useful to get alerts about gigs though.
Never heard of songkick before
Just installed it and it's great for finding out about gigs. Awesome, thanks.
Ever since CBS
Bought last.fm all they've been interested in is developing the radio services at the expense of the fantastic data metric system behind it. Since 2007 I've had a constant trouble with scrobbling correctly whilst they released one broken patch after another. This latest update is the nail in the coffin for me personally, won't scrobble anything properly now. So songkick you say?!