Interview with Last.FM

Last.fm is a posterchild of Open Business strategy – they provide a great service, its basic functions are free of charge and the data they generated is under a CC license. Their method of running a music service is social – they network users music preferences into a living and improving dataset reflecting the musical choices of thousand of individuals. The OpenBusiness Team interviewed Last.FM about how they work, why Last.FM a great service and last but not least why they are not just ‘open’ but also a business…..

OB: Who do you see as your main competition, is it the more traditional broadcasters or so-called infringing technologies like p2p, Pirate Bay and YouTube?

LastFM: We wanna offer an alternative for musicfans, that want to find more music they like and don’t wanna be told, what they have to listen to. It’s all about discovering new music and we are 100% community driven. So we are not necessarily competitive to any of the services you mentioned above, just an alternative.

OB: Last FM describes itself as ‘the social music revolution’, which I guess means that users’ exposure to artists and recordings is influenced more by peer-preferences than by professional promotion / marketing mechanisms. Although friendly recommendations and sharing have always had a strong influence on the avid fans of music, via analogue mixtapes or digital playlists, I wonder if this mechanism would appeal to a wider audience?

LastFM: It’s a shift that is taking place all around us: More and more people are seeking recommendations from their peers rather than some so-called authorities or guardians of taste. As I said earlier, we are completely community driven, so the difference is political, aristocracy versus democracy.

OB: By placing free full length tracks next to the more established artists, the structure of your site encourages users not only to listen to but also to fund new, emerging musicians. What selection mechanism do you operate when choosing these, given the service is free for labels, artists and listeners?

LastFM: If we get the content for free, we push it to our users more. For some of the major label content we have to pay royalties, so we are not going out of our way to explose this content as much as the free, indie music.

OB: Does LastFM share the Audioscrobbler data representing personal music tastes, or do you consider this to be proprietary information?
Would you consider selling the information, for example to an established record label, and what conditions might you put on the use of that data?

LastFM: Currently non-personal, anonymous music usage data is available on our site under a non-commercial creative commons license.
Labels currently get playstats back for the music they have contributed, but that basically amounts to the number of people who have listened to a particular artist. All other information is available for anybody on the website

OB: The collecting agencies have taken up a position against the general use of ‘open’ licenses. What is your opinion of the service they provide to the artists and the wider public?

LastFM: Well, royalty distribution is an extremely laborious process, but somebody has to do it. Obviously they are a bit scared of the “emancipation of the artist”; artists, that are taking charge of their music themselves. But collection societies are still fulfilling a very useful service.

OB: You offer a premium service – why do some users choose this option and what percentage of users choose to do so?

LastFM: We are not into revealing the numbers, but rest assured, there is a fair number of Last.fm users, who donate for extra features. they do it for various reasons: they get more personalisation options for the radio, meaning they can explore music very tightly focused on their interests, they might wanna get rid of the advertising on the Last.fm site, they ight do it because they think that Last.fm is cool.

OB: LastFM is great service and most of it is free for the user – how do you make money?

LastFM: We are selling music (CDs, downloads) through affiliates, and we are making a cut on this. we have the aforementioned donation/upgrade option and we have advertising on the webpage

OB: What’s the future for LastFM: Can you share any new features or plans with our readers at OpenBusiness?

LastFM: We wanna become, what our name implies: the last music platform you’ll ever need. 100% bottom up, socially driven. The place to go for music recommendations, finding other people into the same music as you, listening to music, concert recommendations and so on and so forth.

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