Last.fm and Ping
Does anyone actually use Last.fm for more than scrobbling?
I did when I first subscribed and they allowed me to listen to full tracks of my choice on demand. In more recent times, they have been removing playback features to focus on their scrobbling service. This change makes sense for Last.fm as they have claimed that most of users listen to their music elsewhere and use Last.fm solely for Scrobbling.
What I wonder though, is which came first: the drop in listeners, or the drop in features? Or is this a spiral effect? If the playback features diminish, then many listeners will go elsewhere. However, if many listeners leave, then it ceases to make economic sense to focus on music playback at all.
Last.fm certainly has a unique service – at least until Apple introduced "Ping" into the newest version of iTunes. However I do not foresee Ping as a service that will catch on for several reasons.
First, as far as I can tell, Ping only supports iTunes (which by the way doesn’t even run natively on Linux). Second, Ping does not automatically submit what tracks are being played; listeners have to manually submit these via a button. Third, I have not found any method to track statistics such as most listened to artist for this service.
It could be that I am missing the whole point of Ping, but Apple hasn’t gone out of their way to explain this service either. Although, what should I expect from a company that doesn’t support Flash or Java. Their ideas of beneficial web services seem to be a bit confusing to say the least.
To sum up, while Last.fm has severely limited its playback functionality over time, it still continues to focus on it’s most valuable asset to the online music community: Scrobbling. Fortunately, this service seems unlikely to disappear any time soon as there is no viable competition to it. Now if Pandora would just support scrobbling, the online music service world would be nearly perfect.