[bowlofpetunias]

The thing is, Last.fm started on the premise of changing all that. That was their stated goal, their reason for existing.

Last.fm promised to be a service not simply for listening to music, but for people who love music, and openly critical of the state of the music industry.

Of course all of that changed when they sold to CBS. After that, nothing else seemed to matter but selling subscriptions to the radio service whilst playing nice with the industry. A service which also stopped evolving, and had it's lunch easily eaten by Spotify. Which has to deal with the same licensing mess, but for some reason was already doing a better job when they were still a small startup.

Last.fm gave up a long time ago. And now that Spotify seems to be getting a grip on the recommendations, I don't see Last.fm having any future whatsoever.

[adamlett]

Seconded! Everything about Last.fm started to detereorate from the moment they were bought by CBS. One thing in particular was baffling to me. It seemed like they deliberately tried to deemphasize the community aspects of the site. The weekly computed list of musical neighbours which used to be a great source for music discovery, got burried. Related journals and groups disappeared from artist and tag pages. In short everything that made me want to engage with other users. As a consequence, I began to visit the site less and less frequently. Because after all there is a limit to how interesting it is to look at compiled statistics about the music you listen to.

[crucialfelix]

thirded. the entire point was social listening. even when I didn't like what a friend was into, it was interesting to laugh at the differences in taste.