Qloud vs. last.fm


Last week I pointed out that Qloud would have trouble competing with the likes of last.fm since the user base of Qloud is so small compared to last.fm, and the key to a good social recommender is to have lots of users.  Well, there's some good news for Qloud.  In just a week, the number of Qloud listeners to Green Day's 'American Idiot' has grown by 75% -  going from 4 listeners to 7, while at last.fm's idiot listeners only grew by  less than 2% - going from 341,147 listeners to 346,825 listeners.  Sure, at the end of the week, last.fm had 5675 more listeners, but the trends are clear!

Posted on: Oct 16, 2006

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

One thing that would be really nice is a standardized submission protocol. Since Qloud doesn't use fingerprinting, they could probably use last.fm's protocol, which would let them receive data from any player with a last.fm plugin (that allows you to change the host).

Not everyone uses iTunes. Even though I think last.fm is crap, I won't even look at Qloud until there is a rhythmbox plugin, and there are a lot of people out there using winamp, amarok, foobar2000, etc. Most of them already have audioscrobbler/last.fm support.

Posted by Evan on October 16, 2006 at 02:19 PM EDT #

OK, so under what circumstances would it make sense for Qloud to license some or all of Last.fm's data to address this problem? Last.fm's web services feeds are licensed for non-commercial use -- presumably that's how MyStrands offer this recommendation service. Might Qloud be interested in licensing for commercial use? What price might Last.fm put on this? If the data were the same, would the competition come down to the user interface, the quality of the services surrounding the data, and the 'vibe' of the community?... just speculating wildly...

Posted by David Jennings on October 16, 2006 at 02:51 PM EDT #

[i am one of the founders of qloud] guys-- thanks for the posts and comments. paul-- you are right. the growth is staggering! ;-) indeed we have a ways to go until we are near a threshold volume, but what we think is more interesting is the quality of data captured on a per user basis. by that measure, we are very encouraged. please let us know about any more thoughts you have. evan-- iTunes for Win and Songbird are just the beginning for us. we plan on supporting a wide variety of players.

Posted by Toby Murdock on October 16, 2006 at 02:52 PM EDT #

Toby - good to hear from you - I always appreciate a good discussion - I'm interested in hearing more about what kind of data you are capturing on a per-user basis - I assume it is mostly social tag data. As you know, the social music recommender space is seeing quite a bit of activity. It seems to me that anyone who wants to be successful in this space has to do at least:
  • allow the users to listen to the music (not just 30 seconds snippets either)
  • give good recommendations
  • have a great interface that facilitates exploration
  • protect themselves from shills and vandals
  • Gets users deep into the long tail
I don't think anyone does all of these things perfectly, so there's still room for recommenders. Qloud strength right now seems to be its slick web interface, but its weaknesses are its lack of depth in the data, and the 30 second snippets. Perhaps getting access to the last.fm data (or google's data) as David suggests will be the best way to bootstrap new social recommenders, but I'm guessing that folks like last.fm would be quite reluctant to give away the family jewels. They certainly won't do it for a song ;)

Posted by Paul on October 16, 2006 at 04:37 PM EDT #

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