Music sharing and sales startup Grooveshark has launched Grooveshark Lite, a flash app that provides access to all the songs in Grooveshark’s library. For those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest… → Read More
San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike launched a “news feed” for favorite artists this week. Users can now see exactly what their favorite artists are up to – when they go on tour, release new songs or videos, etc, the news is presented to them in the feed. Users can select their favorite artist via the iLike website or on their social network applications. Or the… → Read More
SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you… → Read More
It sounds like nonsense, but it’s true. Last.fm, the popular social network for music, has announced that starting now, all music on the site can be played by anyone, for free. The catch is that after playing it three times you will be notified of their subscription service, but I don’t think we need to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. They’ve got the big labels… → Read More
It is good to see some creative licensing finally taking hold in the music industry. Today, CBS-owned Last.fm announced that you can now stream the full track of any song up to three times for free, in addition to its regular music-discovery service which streams related songs you might like in a random order. This is also the first step towards a future subscription service, which will allow an… → Read More
Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta. Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix… → Read More
We first wrote about Wakoopa when they launched in April. It’s a downloadable program for application addicts that tracks the software or games you use. We called it a Last.fm for applications, alluding to the program’s tracking and recommendation system similar to audio scrobbling. While there are obvious privacy concerns (addressed here), over 17,000 people have signed up for the… → Read More
Social music recommendation service MyStrands has completed the second half of their B round, raising an additional $24 million from Spanish Bank BBVA on top of the $25 million we reported earlier. BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. This brings total financing… → Read More
I have a special place in my heart for music streaming site Pandora. It was one of the first startups profiled on TechCrunch, back in the summer of 2005. Pandora creates radio stations for users based on input on the songs they like and don’t like. Over time it learns about what you like and tends to play exactly what you are looking for. But it also plays new music that it thinks you will… → Read More
Moving to NYC revived my faith in music as I often frequented popular venues like the Bowery Ballroom, Irving Plaza, Pianos and other hotbeds for new music. I haven’t been to a show in quite some time, which has resulted in me listening to the same albums I’ve been listening to for the last four months. It really sucks because music helps me get through an otherwise monotonous and boring day. → Read More
Satellite radio is in the toilet, and the government and the recording industry are trying to squeeze Internet radio for more dough — unsuccessfully for now, according to today’s news. Meanwhile, social networking sites like Imeem and Last.fm (and MySpace, of course) are continuing to blow everyone away in the digital music scene, thanks in no small part to their focus on community as… → Read More
Last.fm might be the rebel amongst online radio stations, but they just inked a global deal with Sony BMG that will bring a huge collection of popular artists like Avril Lavigne, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and The Boss to the Internet radio’s community as well as an extensive catalog of classic oldies. Last.fm’s fancy recommendation system will serve as a springboard for burgeoning… → Read More
Yahoo, as well as Pandora, MTV, Real/Rhapsody and many others are honoring the “day of silence” today in protest of the ridiculous new royalty rates for Internet radio stations. The big music labels have lobbied to get the U.S. government to really stick it to Internet radio stations, when terrestrial radio stations pay nothing to play songs and Satellite providers pay a greatly… → Read More
The SaveNetRadio coalition will be holding a National Day of Silence June 26 to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that could lead to the shutdown of most of the US Internet radio industry. Most large online music and radio providers are participating including Yahoo, Real (Rhapsody), Accuradio, Live365, MTV and Pandora. Conspicuous in its absence is the now CBS owned Last.fm. To… → Read More
Some breaking news just in from the wire. CBS has purchased Last.fm for $280 million in cash. With more than 15 million active users, myself included, Last.fm is well worth the money with all the rich features it offers. CBS has said it plans on turning the site from a content-based site to an audience-based one. What that exactly means is beyond me, so I suppose in time we’ll see CBS’… → Read More
The quickly growing music social network Last.fm has been acquired by CBS for $280 million in an all-cash deal. UK based Last.fm launched five years ago and has become a social networking favorite with 15 million active users. It has become a massive repository for music information (artist and song wikis, listening data from users, etc.). In the U.S., companies like Pandora, MOG and iLike all… → Read More
Last.fm is a seriously popular music service (we’ve dubbed it a viral machine). So users are wondering why they are yet to release a Facebook application – competitors like iLike and MOG are the first and fifth most popular applications, respectively. The Last.fm forums are being lit up with user requests for integration. In early May, a staff member (flaneur) commented… → Read More
Last.fm launched an embeddable radio widget today that lets you add a personalized Last.fm radio station wherever Flash widgets are accepted. The widget can play in three modes: a stream of what songs your recently listened to on Last.fm, hand-picked tracks, or full songs of related artists based on your personal preferences. If you want to play specific tracks, you must seed the widget with 15 or… → Read More
Later today music social network iLike will report that they’ve reached half a million registered users in the first four months since launching. What won’t be disclosed, but I’m hearing from insiders, is that around 20,000 new users are joining daily. The company, along with MOG, will present at the Digital Music Forum East conference in New York tomorrow. Together the two… → Read More
Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their… → Read More
If you are any way into music and use any semi-popular MP3 player (software-based), you should check out Last.fm! You install a little plugin onto your PC or Mac and it collects song information from your MP3 player and puts it into a database. So now you can see just how many times you listened to Jimmy Eat World – Sweetness and what albums you listen to are the least popular. Oh and did I… → Read More
Music recommendation service Last.fm relaunched this morning with a number of new features including a Flash player in addition to the desktop client, free MP3s available from independent artists and affiliate sales of recommended concert tickets. See our previous coverage of Last.fm here. At relaunch, the company says it has 15 million unique active users per month from 200 countries, listening… → Read More
For those of you who are fans of Pandora, Last.fm or both, you’ll like this mashup by Gabe Kangas. I wrote about it last month, when it was a bit of a hack. Now, Pandora is fully supporting the effort and has even given Gabe access to the Pandora API to create a more stable application. The mashup is basically the Pandora player, and listeners have the ability to add music played by Pandora… → Read More
People who love music seems to either be Pandora folks or Last.fm folks, and the two groups often disagree (see, for example, the comments to this post). Quite frankly, the two services each do different things very well, although there is some overlap. Pandora is great for discovering new music based on what you like. Last.fm is also good at music discovery, but you can’t stream music… → Read More
Fred Wilson has a good post today comparing the Last.fm and Pandora music services. He’s strongly in favor of Last.fm. I use and have written about both services. Each allows you to find new music that you are likely to enjoy. Last.fm does this through analysis of what you listen to and like (and what others listen to and like). Pandora encodes different aspects of music and determines what… → Read More
Company: Last.fm Location: London Launched: 2002, redesigned in 2005 With applications like Pandora (profile) getting some attention from the blogosphere, it’s time to shed some light on another music-related project that’s been around for some time now and that I’m quite fond of – Last.fm. Last FM (now merged with the Audioscrobbler project) allows you to generate a… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
