Matthew Ogle and Anil-Bawa-Cavia Last.fm
MO:
We connect people to music they love, event if they haven't heard it yet.
How does it work?
You just listen
- to your own music.
- Or the last.fm radio
Share
- your taste instead of files.
- automative via scrobbling
Discover
- via your friends
- via people with similar tastes
15 million tracks that we scrobble every day
175 scrobbles per second
6 billion tracked scrobbled since 2003
10 million artists
70 million tracks
700k tracks streamable on Last.fm radio
17 million items tagged.
145k artist wikis
AudioScrobbler was built a university project.
Last.fm in 2004, based in whitechapel.
Early Growth lessons
Don't overextend - scale with your growth, not before.
Make sure your revenue scales with your site as you grow.
Google ads
User subscriptions - scales with your userbase
Involve users with your web apps story.
Make growth a selfish aim for existing users.
Be as open as you can afford.
Started by donations due to open source nature.
Openness and Growth
in 2004 we had a cool service but needed data
Audioscrobbler Protocol 1.0
Web services for accessing users' music profile data
Together, provided "round trip" incentive for plugin developers
Winamp, iTunes WMP Amarok,
foobar etc
Openness and Growth
Involve non-tech users as well
Promote a community around your app
Talk to your users, bad news is ok, e.g the sky is falling we need more servers etc.
We started showing graphs of submission rates. When things went bad users didn't freak out.
Error messages say go make a cup of tea, some users took this literally.
ABC: Moving in to the new office in Old Street
Growing up
process - how does rapid growth affect the team
20 to 40+ employees in 6 months - Communication across tech and non-technical boundaries
"People trump process"
Simple tools are effective tools
radiate information across different channels in the company
We use irc to communicate across the whole company. Simple been around for ages
Excerpt from irc:
Fixes, questions, bugs, patches are all announced on the irc channel
osmotic communication
15 million unique users a month.
plan for going global, not just a technical challenge
Afilliations should enhance the user experience. - Everyone's going to approach you when you get this big.
harness critical mass
Events/shows
UGC
Add buy tickets links is subtle but has a use
Embed your services in others, blogs etc
Album Quilts
Charts
Transition from service to platform
Open up your api
Openness is a key to web platforms
Matthew Ogle:
Attention and Myware
Powered by Audioscrobbler logo, this is foundation.
When you pay attention to something (or don't) data is created. Skipping a track is data.
Myware: spy on yourself.
The benefits of sharing this data outweighs keeping it to yourself.
Attention economy alters traditional meaning of "active user", someone can be sitting back listening to music for example.
Social web + attention aggregators = where the action is.
Events dashboard, matches events to where you live. According to your tastes. This is driven by UGC
Same thing with Recommended journals.
ABC:
Monetizing attention data.
1. Microchunk it reduce it to it's simplest form
2. free it - Put it out there without walls
3. syndicate it - let anyone take it and run with it.
4. Monetize it. Put the monetisation into the microchunk/
Powerplay is sponsored airtime.
Individualized targeting based on attention history
New attention metrics for reporting
No more CPMs - the scrobble is our attention unit.
Attention Data
Case study: tag cloud moderation
Paris Hilton tag cloud - e.g. Officially Shit, overrated, shit, slut etc.
Censorship is not acceptable in a folksonomy
Attention data does not lie
Weigh tags by attention
People who listen to Paris Hilton could have more say.
Attention earns trust
Matthew Ogle:
Future of Last.fm
more
Growth
more streamable music
more ambient findability - you should discover stuff more organically.
more personalization / things you can do with your data
less
fewer interfaces
fewer barriers to entry
fewer gradients
Questions:
Q: With the attention data being so key do you worry about manipulation of the data.
A: Spamming is a huge problem potentially. There's rudimentary protection built in. You can't listen to the same track over and over.
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