It was my good friend Stefan Glaenzer (also investor in Wahanda) who several years ago, as Chairman of last.fm first turned me onto the service — I was blown away. Here was a powerful way of creating communities and sharing information around a topic that people feel passionate about — music. Moreover, it had a built in recommendation engine that worked really well and a personal radio station to boot! Best of all, through the use of its scrobbling technology, it collected this information and build these communities with virtually no effort from the user — it simply monitored the music that you listened to. Could it get any better? Well, actually, yes…
At first, the issue was that the scrobbling only worked on your computer. This was an issue as I actually rarely listen to music on my Mac… I have always preferred using the iPod as I found the navigation through my library easier than iTunes. Then, last.fm sorted that out by enabling scrobbling on my iPod so that when I synched the device to my Mac it tracked all I had listened to.
But that left a bigger problem. I actually don’t use my iPod that often. I rarely listen to music in the office (I hate not hearing what is going on and believe that it sends the wrong message to the people around me) and so I really only use it when excercising or on a plane. But I am a have a big collection of music and am a huge consumer of music at home through my Sonos system. I was so frustrated that my musical tastes weren’t being tracked fully. Moreover, I was frustrated that I couldn’t listen to my last.fm radio when I was at home.
Well, someone at last.fm has been working hard and after several years of saying it was coming its now available on the Sonos! This means that not only can I access my last.fm radio stations at home but it’s also scrobbling my music at home which means it has a much better understanding of my taste. Nothing has transformed my use of last.fm and my view of it as an essential resource in my music library more than that simple step.
One unforseen issue is that my wife happens to use the Sonos as well and we don’t always share the same tastes (I’m still working on that one) but so far that hasn’t affected my recommendations too badly (yet).
So now there is only one thing left for Sonos to sort out. I wish they measured the degree to which I like a song based on how long I listen to a song not just the number of times I listed to the song. Like so many people, I often listen to things on shuffle and a song may come up which I listen to for only a few seconds before forwarding to the next. Unfortunately Sonos seems to track that as if I played the whole song.
Then again you can’t have everything… at least not yet.
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