Subject: Last.fm Collectively Kicks My Nuts

Date: July 15th, 2006 @ 3:37 pm

From: Phil Nelson

To:

Last.fm, why have you forsaken me? Today last.fm (“the social music revolution”) unveiled a big redesign of the site (which isn’t bad, just really light red), and also a new version of their music playing/rating/tagging system. So far, so good. Oh, and they also all but killed off the iTunes and Winamp and Windows Media Player track-submission plugins. The only one you can still grab is iScrobbler (for iTunes on OS X), and that’s only because the OS X Last.fm client is in beta. I’d imagine once it goes GM, they’ll remove it entirely.

I really like Last.fm. They seem like cool people, their service has been great to me over the last year or so, and it’s cost me nothing. But here’s the thing: I’m not going to use your shitty music player, last.fm. I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time on it, and lots of people have worked very hard. But it’s feature set is suspect, it bogs down my aging G4 Powermac, the OS X interface is pretty lame, and I love iTunes. I have 6,220 songs in my iTunes library already categorized, cross-referenced, tagged, shagged, and playlisted. I’ve spent 4 years constantly tweaking the semi-random ‘radio’ playlist. I’m not going to toss away all of that, or run another application concurrenty, just because I like you, and I’m not sure why you think I will.

We’ve had fun, last.fm. I’m sorry, but I think once you entirely kill off iScrobbler, we should just be friends.

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2 Responses to “Last.fm Collectively Kicks My Nuts”

  1. Shawn wrote:

    July 17th, 2006 at 10:10 pm

    Wow, this is a horrible approach. It will totally bite them in the ass. Bummer.

  2. monster-monster wrote:

    July 18th, 2006 at 10:22 am

    Actually, the new app works exactly like the old iScrobbler plugin—it just has radio integration. So you can still listen with iTunes all you want.

    Plus, there’s a new release coming out shortly that fixes a lot of the problems in the Mac beta So you’ll be able to leave it open (but not quit), in your dock the same way iTunes behaves.

    If anything it’s better than all of the unsupported third party software from before. Try out the new mac version when it’s out of beta and I think you’ll take it all back. As for iScrobbler, I doubt that will go anywhere, it will just remain without support on the FAQ etc.

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