Last.fm: A Music Tagspace

I had the chance to sit down in London this week with Felix Miller, CEO, and Stefan Glaenzer, Chairman, of Last.fm. Last.fm is one of the examples I use in the Building Social Applications workshop that I am giving in various locales (like the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo and the recent Lift conference).

It was interesting to hear about the new Time Warner deal, but more interesting by far to hear these two state that the commerce angle -- allowing Last.fm users to download music -- is not the real focus of the service. There is so much sharing of music outside the commercial realm that they don't see any future there: commodity competition at best.

They, like me, believe that the future is providing a quality social experience around music. And they are eager to push forward.

I offered a few suggestions, which I relate here, since I have done so in the workshops and other venues:

1. Music Tagspace -- The fact that Last.fm has it's own internal blogging solution (with tight integration with the Last.fm music database) is not enough to get most bloggers to give up their own, external blogs. I recommended that they should support a Technorati-like service, where I could encode a reference to some piece of music, album, or artist (or even an arbitrary music-related tag, for that matter) and point it to the Last.fm tagspace. For example, a tag referencing Steve Adey's All Things Real CD might be structured like this:

   <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Adey/All+Things+Real" rel="tag">All Things Real by Steve Adey</a>

   This is just like Technorati tags, and of course, Last.fm would have to accept pings, like Technorati, and also would have to spider the blog entries to discern what the tags are pointing to.

   I also recommended that they should automaitcally create a corresponding blog post in the internal blog, referencing the external post by trackback and link.
   

2. Better Blog Widgets -- I recommended more and better blog widgets to get bloggers more involved with Last.fm. For example, if I am using Last.fm as my music tagspace, how about a music tagcloud based on my listening and writing, merged together?
   

I am betting they will continue their innovation in this direction. And, remember, you heard it here first!

They also chatted with me about the February update at Last.fm. Everyone can now publish radio stations, and they have introduced playlists. I haven't fooled with the new features, yet. Expect a post next week.

tags: last.fm, felix+miller, stefan+glaenzer, tags, tagspace, music+discovery, technorati