![]() There is no substitute for working with a world-class team on a product you are passionate about that is used by millions of people. I turned 30 this year - most of my 20s were spent building Audioscrobbler and Last.fm. What have you been up to that you'd like people to know about? There are a lot of details to consider, but something like that should be possible.Įvolver.fm: Can you believe it's been 10 years since you released Audioscrobbler? I can't it seems like yesterday. Commercial use of the data is subject to a fee, which in turn pays for the foundation to run their infrastructure. ![]() Open source and noncommercial entities can use the data for free. One possible model for the future is something like - a foundation or nonprofit entity that holds the data. Decentralizing or otherwise federating the scrobbling data makes it less useful overall, unless you have a central way of browsing it, which is costly. Hosting and crunching lots of data requires lots of hardware, which isn't cheap. You need a lot of data in one place to be able to do interesting things with it. Jones: I've entertained this idea a few times in the past, but practical and logistical concerns tended to stop any efforts in their tracks. Facebook have done a fine job of bolting it on to their existing product, but it's definitely one of those features that deserves to be more than an afterthought.Įvolver.fm: Does scrobbling need to be an open standard, do you think? Or is it fine as part of Last.fm, Facebook, and other proprietary networks? ![]() To do it justice, you need a dedicated team and a dedicated product. Jones: I think scrobbling and the idea of a music profile is important enough to warrant a product in its own right. When that happened, we shut down the Audioscrobbler legal entity, and I ended up with the same percent ownership of Last.fm as the other Last.fm founders.Įvolver.fm: What was your reaction when you saw Facebook implement, essentially, your scrobbling idea on a mass-market level? Did that take you by surprise, or did you always know that scrobbling was for everyone? Once we presented a single, unified website, the resulting whole was definitely greater than the sum of the parts, and the growth sped up dramatically. There were many similarities in the long-term plans for both projects, the first meeting went really well, so we decided to merge the two projects. Last.fm and Audioscrobbler had both started completely independently at around the same time. Jones: I'm not sure "acquired" is the right way to look at it. I think that was when it first dawned on me that what we were doing could turn out to be a viable business, as well as a labor of love.Įvolver.fm: How did Audioscrobbler get acquired by Last.fm? What was/is your reaction to how widespread its use became after that? The first month we ran ads on the website, we made a few thousand pounds. We were struggling to afford rent, servers, etc. The surge in interest and signups was highly motivating.Īs silly as it sounds, the other occasion that stands out for me is a bit later on, when we got our first Google Adsense payment in the mail. ![]() People were starting to write about Audioscrobbler in early 2003 ( possibly being the first blog) and there was coverage in The Guardian (the first mainstream press article, if I remember correctly), BBC, etc. The handful of friends I had initially convinced to install my Winamp plugin "so I can collect enough data for my dissertation" had told all their friends, and before long, I was seeing new people signing up every day from all over the world. The next occasion I remember was when I spent some time digging in the logs and running the numbers, a few months after I started. That was the "Audioscrobbler minimum viable product." I remember thinking I had discovered something pretty cool at that point. I had no idea that would be such a fun and interesting thing to explore until I'd built it. That mechanic was core to the whole experience, and still is today.
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