Ludovic Copéré

Last.fm reloaded... and tagged

Since a couple of hours ago today, Last.fm, everybody's favorite music-based social filtering and recommendation web service, has reopened along with a much needed and waited-for facelift. For those joining the bandwagon right now, Last.fm could be described as a mix between a personalized radio stream and a social networking service (with musical-taste proximity being the "distance" between users).

Besides the now much cleaner and simplified "less-is-more" design, I see that Last.fm has integrated the concept of tags, that is already widespread in the live-content sphere, such as with Technorati's for blogs or Flickr's for photos. Here music tracks can be tagged to reflect the artist / genre or pretty much anything, the service then aggregating the tags altogether. And just like in Flickr where a picture stream representing picture bearing a specific tag can be displayed, here a musical collection of tracks with a specific tag can be streamed to registered users. Seems like an interesting method of expanding one's musical tastes (besides the personalized radio streams), and also a new way of looking at music charts from a more consumer-centric perspective.

Is it the first step towards seeing in the mass media a "Last.fm top 50" alongside the traditional top 50/100 album sales and top digital downloads?

The OECD takes on Digital Music

The OECD (Organisation for Econocomic Co-operation and Development) publicly published a few days ago its Report on Digital Music. A very insightful read, it exposes key insights on how the music industry is shifting from a physical media business down to a broadband content business. It also debunks some of the most extreme (and caricatural) depictions of the Internet music industry as being the sole haven of piracy by showing how the value chain is currently reshaping itself and creating new models to better understand both the "Consumers as users of music content" and its dual perspective, the "New content created by network users". In short, from broadcast to broadcatch.

While this rethinking in terms of technology (how to find a proper DRM compromise? How to ensure inter-operability?), legislation (what is the new meaning of fair use? How can Intellectual Property rights evolve?) and business (what is the proper mix of content and network? Which payment models are adapted) is still under way, legal online music stores have already gained a  solid foothold against free file-sharing network: as noted in this Reuters article, "around 35% of music consumers now download tracks legally via the Internet and the percentage will soon pass the 40% who have pirated music". Interesting times for new media in general, and "music 2.0" in particular!