"Employing an internal data griot makes a lot of sense: someone who can spend the time looking for both large trends and individual needs and uses that illuminate and portend. It’s a hard job, needing a mix of skills rarely found – a smidgen of hard maths and statistics, a pinch of programming, and dessert spoons of various liberal arts. The Economist (sub required) posits them as data scientists (a position Flickr are currently looking for), but this misses the ability to ask interesting questions, and having hunches – being so immersed in the data that relevancy screams out."

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

"Create your own site with music from SoundCloud, gigs from Songkick or Last.fm, news/posts from Tumblr."

Uses the Last.fm API to find similar artists on Spotify. Very nice.

"To date, we’ve only had machine tags “extras” available for upcoming:event= and lastfm:event= tags but starting today we’re adding support for three new projects: Dopplr, Open Plaques and the Open Library."

"Jones said how most open city games tend to come with about 100 licensed tracks, but that they realised that most players would far rather listen to their own mp3 collection. But this is an online game. So they’ve done a deal with Last.FM to use their technology in such a brilliantly imaginative way. If you’re listening to a favourite track in your car, and drive past some other players, should they have the same track on their hard drive the game will find it, and they’ll hear it from your car as you go by. Should they not have it, the game will find a track that’s similar and play that instead." Pipped.

"Adds a widget to list an artists upcoming shows or your top tracks from Last.FM on your Wordpress blog"

Answer: probably not.

"The relationship between musicians and the people who make music websites is slightly broken. The problem is that anyone developing a new service for bands has to make money to keep the project afloat - and that means pulling in enough eyeballs to sell advertising on the site. The best way to get people to stick around to click on some ads? Make them invest time and energy in creating a profile, and encourage them to continually update it."

"Wouldn’t it be great if you could tune into your local music like you do with Last.fm radio?" Yes. Yes it would.

"The more I think about it, the more I want a portable Last.fm player. Not just a client app, but a proper dedicated piece of hardware, with big round love, ban and skip buttons."

Good to see a bit more info on this. Experimented with irccat after seeing it mentioned at FOWA a couple of years ago but had trouble getting the dynamics right for a multi-project model.

No alarms and no surprises.

Fairly obvious but useful for reminding people.

Fairly obvious but useful for reminding people.

Seems to be US-only for now. Wonder if labels/artists will be able to add their own lyrics through MusicManager?

Last.fm has started autodiscovering feeds on artist's homepages (using Musicbrainz data) and pulling it into their site. Lovely. Bit of a pain when it comes to artist disambiguation, though.

"Imeem is the third-largest social network in the United States after MySpace and Facebook; and it's now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US. That puts it above one of our favorites, CBS-owned last.fm."

"Enter your last.fm username to create a feed of new and upcoming music releases from the artists you scrobble."

"Last.fm, which announces a major relaunch today, will start showing advertising that can tap into the community features of the site, making adverts more engaging, the site said."

Boomkat seem to be doing a good job with their Last.fm group.

Orange campaign by Poke.

Extensive new Last.fm API. Joy!

"What you’ll be creating is an automated music tumblelog." with Last.fm, Pipes and Tumblr. Very cool.

"Welcome to the new AOL Radio service powered by Last.fm!" Hmmm.

"Last.fm claims its 12-week-old free, full-track music streams have resulted in 119 percent more CD and download sales through its Amazon.com click-through partnership."

"By now, you know all about Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead selling their latest albums at various prices, depending on the format. London-based indie electronica label Highpoint Lowlife is experimenting with a similar model for its new quadruple EP compila

"Free extras built by the community to extend your Last.fm experience."

Free album from JH. Hurrah!

"Creates a weekly feed of your top 5 artists from Last.fm for import into Tumblr."

"90% of everything is always crap. The more stuff there is, the greater the 10% pile becomes. All we need are effective filtering systems to sort what we consider to be wheat from what we consider to be chaff."

"If the volume of searches reflect the regional popularity of a search string, then Google Trends reveal useful information for marketing agencies, record labels, and booking agents."

"The music industry is evolving, and major labels are starting to develop new strategies to help adapt to the current DIY climate."

"We searched the site and found three up-and-coming bands we know are a million times better than anything Simon Cowell will inflict on us. We want you to decide which one we take into the Christmas Charts this year."

"Interface with the Visualizer through Flickr and LastFM tags, using any tag to create a Magnet. Once a Tag Magnet is created, members of the network will gravitate towards it if they have photos or music with that same Tag."

"The main objective of this group is to collect all the interesting tools related to music stats that are scattered around last.fm"

"The future of record labels and why online battle of the band competitions produce “an endless reservoir of shit”."

"Releasing music is a real responsibility as you’re dealing with people’s creativity and in some cases the starts of their careers – the last thing an act needs is a false start or early over-exposure before they’ve developed into being something

"The next time you tag something cheese on toast or woopwoop you might actually cause some researchers somewhere out there sleepless nights while they are trying to understand what kind of music those tags define." Oops!

Assume this is a custom group page. Hadn't realised that was on offer...

Some background on last.fm, including information on Power Plays.

"The first time Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller, Last.fm's founders, have spoken publicly on the acquisition of their site since it was purchased by CBS in May"

"Last.fm [...] is launching a PR campaign in the guise of an initiative to get unsigned and independent bands using online tools to build their careers."

Live recordings from the Last.fm gig.

"Last.fm is a pretty simple way to listen to tunes, but there are a few quick and dirty ways you can oomph it up a little."

Highpoint Lowlife have put (almost) all their albums up for free on last.fm Smart move!

Good question but from the responses it would seem not.

"LastGraph is a wavegraph generator for Last.fm. Give us a username and some dates, and our highly-trained rendering servers will crunch away and produce a lovely graph of your listening habits."

"The Mainstream-O-Meter calculates your mainstreamness by comparing the listener count of your favorite bands to the average listener count of the five bands who have the most listeners among Last.fm-users."

"At last.fm, all the developers join an irc channel which we use for communications, sharing links, bugs etc.. and into which various system messages are automatically sent via irccat."

"Some of the web's most innovative developers might want to check the temperature when they arrive for the Future of Web Apps conference this week -- in tech circles, this city is getting hot again."

"Enter your last.fm and upcoming.org usernames and we'll keep track of the artists you listen to and let you know if they're coming to your town." Shame it's broken.

Wordpress last.fm widget.

"As you listen to music via the excellent Pandora music service each song gets submitted to your profile on Last.FM."

Created a group for Uncharted Audio. Join!

Created a group for LJ Kruzer. Join!