Post your Audiosrobbler userlink so we can always watch what you're listening to

I must admit, I have no idea what that 1st cover is on the bottom column on mine.
Sometimes compilation album do covers come up and that throws me.

A friend convinced me to join last.fm:

http://www.last.fm/user/lixenixen/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7205147.stm

Yeah, I just got word about this as well. BIG news, I'd say.

http://blog.last.fm/2008/01/23/free-the-music

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service.

The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

We’re publicly beta testing our new free listening service. You can listen to most tracks up to three times for free.

When the beta is over, we’ll offer a subscription package with unlimited access to a catalogue of music built on partnerships with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner, EMI and over 150,000 independent labels and artists.

We will continue to offer our existing Basic Subscription.

subscription?

so you have to pay them to stream tracks for free...?

more than 3x

ah ok

i guess this is aight for ppl who don't know about like hype machine or .rar blogs or that you can stream basically any song ever on youtube

i could see myself streaming a song once in a while

I can't see many people paying to stream rather than download but last fm do have established users who might do it because it's last fm and anything they stream will still be logged in their stats.
I'm guessing a lot of people may subscribe for 1 month to try it but how many will do that beyond is anyones guess.

i'm a subscriber anyway (as are you, herman) so i'll be interested to see what the deal is with my existing set-up ... but yeh, i think this is pretty big fucking news.

i was thinking about it on the way home from work: with the way tech is going (ie a move away from "your computer with all your stuff" towards "your client machines talking to your server"), some kind of streaming model for music makes a lot of sense. ie from "you should hear this record when you get a chance" > "listen to this on my iPod ... oh, fuck, i deleted it to make space for something else" > "here, hear it right now -- let's stream it to my 3D holographic iHelmet". we're a way off that just yet, but this is a very interesting move.

and jordan: i know fuck all about hype machine (although i'm about to rectify that, right enough) and youtube is a shit way to listen to music. the key here is not what we, the existing last.fm users, think: it's whether floods of new people will be attracted to the service because it's simple and straightforward and good. i'd like to think so. i shall watch with interest.

i mean, the concept of "owning" music is a bit fucked anyway, no? i used to be so bloody proud of all my vinyl. i cherished it. if you'd told me that in 2008 i'd be sitting here with two hard disks full of music, none of which i can actually *hold*, i'd have wept. but now i'm here, i fucking love it. in the future: what does it matter whose hard disk the files are on, as long as i can listen to what i want, when i want to?

Surely it will have to be a shitty quality stream?

i'm a subscriber anyway (as are you, herman) so i'll be interested to see what the deal is with my existing set-up ... but yeh, i think this is pretty big fucking news.

It will be a seperate subscription.

http://www.last.fm/subscribe/

COMING SOON...

…Unlimited Listening Subscription

We’re publicly beta testing our new free listening service. You can listen to most tracks up to three times for free.

When the beta is over, we’ll offer a subscription package with unlimited access to a catalogue of music built on partnerships with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner, EMI and over 150,000 independent labels and artists.

We will continue to offer our existing Basic Subscription.

How much do you think the subscription for streaming full albums will be?
btw I prefer owning the lp or cd. Or even the odd tape release.

Surely it will have to be a shitty quality stream?

of course. but again: i'm listening to almost everything at 128kbps AAC these days, so "quality" is a moot point.

eeeeee

I'm listening to nothing below 192.

Just Say No! To Below (192)

Audiophile wars part 1452672435123523142314.

What do you rip the cds to that you sell, Ned?

dude behind audio hijack considers the betamax doctrine: short, very much worth reading

does this mean anything new for the radio stations and playlists and such? Since they currently, theoretically, let you listen to a track as many times as you want, but not choose specific tracks to listen to (although if you create a relatively small playlist that wouldn't be much of an issue, I imagine).

What do you rip the cds to that you sell, Ned?

Up to now, CDRs I've never touched much. (Seriously, a lot of stuff I ripped and sold back in 2004 and the discs were just filed and forgotten.) Now that I've finally got the external HD, they'll go on that.

Hehe i meant bitrate.

128 AAC = 192 MP3

false

read it on a digital audiophile site ages ago and made sense considering AAC is the more efficient format. i don't use it tho.

not trying to be wet blanket but only 8 of my top 50 tracks can be heard in full so far and around half don't even have a 'play 30 seconds' button. not really obscure stuff either.

you've only yourself to blame if base58.com can't come to an agreement

bitrate is more important than format. aac is a little better than lame mp3 at low bitrates but not that much.

Wonder how much this subscription will be and if it will be worth it?

My weekly album collage
http://lastfm.obsessive-media.de/weekly/10x3/trailofgybe.jpeg
What's all yours for this week?

hmm it didn't show
http://lastfm.obsessive-media.de/weekly/3x10/trailofgybe.jpeg

Weird, now it has.

I haven't tried this before, let's see if it works:

http://lastfm.obsessive-media.de/weekly/4x4/lixenixen.jpeg

the open minded index is back up again http://omi.musickum.com/index.php5

Some handy tools here http://build.last.fm/

why does last.fm never srobble RA podcasts?

This is pretty cool:

http://www.associativetrails.com/stuff/normalisefm/index.cfm

It ranks your top artists by how many minutes you have spent listening to them, rather than how many different tracks. Then it even tells you how your rankings have changed. So, for me, Stars of the Lid (looong tracks) bumped up ten spots, and Cassetteboy (many short tracks per album) dropped down 24 spots. Pretty cool.

pretty cool.

yah thanx

Yeah, that's neat. My biggest beneficiaries were, unsurprisingly, electronic artists. Luomo, for instance, jumped up 20 spots from #27 to #7.

Who broke the top artists?

Yeah, my top artists are completely screwed up. I've lost probably 5,000-6,000 scrobbled tracks.

Yeah. My top 50 top artists has been wiped out. Hardly any of those acts are there now.
It looks as almost as if its now a rolling 3 month chart for top artists.

If i go to the full top artists chart it's fine though. How strange
http://www.last.fm/user/trailofgybe/charts/?charttype=overall&subtype=artist

couldn't find this thread earlier because of that missing 'c'

overall charts are broke for many users right now - apparently it's being fixed