Napster, I hardly new ye
Last.fm has been getting a whole lotta love about yesterday's announcement that they would offer free on-demand music streaming. Commenters on RJ's blog post seemed downright giddy. Multiple Digg front page stories, the blog-o-sphere all a twitter. People seem genuinely excited about free on-demand tracks at Last.fm.
Which may seem to be a bit puzzling. Napster has offered the exact same free, web-based, on-demand music listening. From the Napster FAQ: You can search our catalog of 3 million songs and stream songs up to 3 times each for FREE. After the 3rd free play of any single track, you can either purchase the track or become a Napster subscriber. As a subscriber, you can download an unlimited number of full-length songs to your PC. As a Napster To Go subscriber you can transfer those tracks to your compatible portable player without paying per track.
Compare that to the Last.fm announcement: 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.
It's the same deal. So why are we so excited about Last.fm offering something that has been available for years? For me the difference is clear. Last.fm is all about music discovery. They have many (perhaps too many!) ways to help me find new music. They have the traditional charts that show me what is popular. They recommend music based upon my listening behavior (I don't have to manually rate tracks). They do clever things with the massive amounts of social tags they've collected. They will let me explore my friends listening to help me find new music. They make lots of their data available so others can try to build new things around the Last.fm listening experience.
To me, Last.fm is like a big music club, where there are lots of people who are really interested in music, and where there are lots of toys to play with. And now this music club is giving us a new toy .... on-demand music. Napster, on the other hand, is like a big hardware store. They probably have all of the stuff that I'm looking for, but it is probably not a place that I'd want to hang out.
Music pundits have been
proclaiming that music subscription services are dead - but I think they
are wrong. It is just that these subscription services can't keep
their subscribers because they don't know how to keep the subscribers
happy. You can't just throw 3 million songs onto the net and leave
your subscribers to find the music. If you want to keep your
subscribers, you've got to keep them happy - and the way to do that is
to surround your millions of tracks with ways to help people explore all
that music. Last.fm knows how to do this. That's why I am
excited about Last.fm.
If you've ever used free Napster you know how horrible the sound quality is. All tracks sound like 64kbps, at best. Last.fm is much better sounding.
I agree that Last.fm is doing a lot of things right, and Napster has had a pretty clumsy run every since it went legit, but I think much of the demise of free Napster has to do with poor implementation and user experience (I'm including sound quality here).
If you're going to give away free streaming music at low quality, don't bother. You've already crippled your service right out of the gate.
Posted by Dan on January 24, 2008 at 08:30 AM EST #
You also have to remember that Napster was sued over allowing music. I'm betting that there are lots of people who dread using Napster because of the possibility that they might be doing something illegal. Still, Kudos for last.fm for finally going the right direction. Now all we need is the research to make the discovery better.
Posted by Jeremy on January 24, 2008 at 08:32 AM EST #