Last.fm is going for FULL SCREEN ads on the background, totally rape

I'm just impressed staff reply to threads describing things as "totally rape" (which was funny) with sensible, candid answers. +1 last.fm

I posted your post in quotes here on the Bring back last.fm group for discussion.

I'm SHOCKED to hear the 280m went to the previous owner (whoever that was?!) and wasn't used to pay last.fm's bills at all. But as much as I understand and sympathize with the business side of the company, I think put ads on such a scale and design (ads in full background; whole site design to accommodate ads) will deter a great many users.

A good compromise, I think, would be to bring the old layout back with suitable redesigns to accommodate the ads you want to put (I assume it's a matter of quantity--please don't do full background, please), and offer it to everyone as an option. I remember ads on old last.fm, I didn't use ad blocker and didn't think I need to; I see them and think they integrated well with the whole design and are relevant and interesting enough to make me click now and then. But if last.fm decides to push the users (out of whatever reason) and force feed ads, they are just gonna turn to firefox and an evolving bank of scripts to block out all. Lose-lose situation, and I sincerely hope the team would reconsider.

I thank and applaud you for replying to our questions head-on, bravo Russ. Hope to hear more from you soon.

greenwatch said:
I'm SHOCKED to hear the 280m went to the previous owner (whoever that was?!) and wasn't used to pay last.fm's bills at all.

Err... that's what happens when you buy something - the money goes to the previous owner!

greenwatch said:
dougma said:
greenwatch said:
I'm SHOCKED to hear the 280m went to the previous owner (whoever that was?!) and wasn't used to pay last.fm's bills at all.

Err... that's what happens when you buy something - the money goes to the previous owner!
I don't know that much about how businesses are run, too much of an idealistic, bookish kind of person, you know.. and now I feel really sad for the staff, those who believe in the initial vision and what they do, anyway. This is awful.


Pretty normal. If you work somewhere (and not owning the company) when the company gets sold you don't see a penny. (Most likely you will see a reorganisation in the near future with possible job loss though =p)

http://www.last.fm/group/Bring+back+the+old+Last.fm/forum/103555/_/436731

* tazru333 said...
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* Subscriber
* 22 Jul 2008, 20:24

The Staff have done this whole thing from an Ivory Tower, no criticism of the Beta was even allowed during testing. We would just get used to it. We are just too unsophisticated to see the Emperor's New Clothes. Honestly, it would be time for the whole Staff there to take some Progressive Management courses, Customer Service would need to be a concentration. Here is something right in the UK: http://www.deming.org.uk/

Best recommendation from me would be The Society for Organizational Learning: http://www.solonline.org/
This episode shows business practices that are very Old School, Medieval even. Perhaps that would explain all the trolls?
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Russ is probably standing alone during their meetings, it does not seem that the staff has a very high opinion of the users here. I've been in that kind of situation myself, he has my deepest sympathy in dealing with the rest of management. Bad management is why I became so passionate about studying the works of people like Deming. It does not have to be this way, but will stay like this unless we can get a "hundred monkeys" among us to make it so. That goes for this thingie with Last.fm and much larger picture/hologram.
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* gothicform said...
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* User
* 22 Jul 2008, 20:42

Anyway, the old last.fm was generating money too, else noone would've bought it, so that pretty much everything said above (yet again) an invalid argument.

It doesnt work like that unfortunately. One of my websites is worth tens of millions of dollars despite having little monetization. People often buy websites because if they are fully exploited commercially they figure they can make money.

The site doesn't make say 6 million dollars profit which would be what you'd expect given its valuation, it makes almost nothing but because people are willing to pay for things that have potential they will pay silly money.

Last.fm now has to realise the investment that CBS paid for it. If they paid 280 million they will expect perhaps 28 million dollars a year in profit. That means wholesale commercialisation of the website, and probably the death of everything that made it good in the process as they try to squeeze every last penny out of it.

Some staff will probably end up walking. Start-ups often attract evangelical people who believe in what they are doing and don't like it when commercialisation happens and with audioscrobbler being open source, they might be smart to do their own little start-up that recaptures everything last.fm was without the corporate whoring.

Now I am not opposed to advertising in the least. God knows I make money from it myself, but what I am opposed to is how you do it. Adverts actually work better if they blend in with the content but this doesn't seem to be listened to by most advertisers who want their ads to stand out - ego rather than effectiveness. Last.fm seem intent on implementing everything as botched and stupidly as possible.
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* gothicform said...
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* User
* 22 Jul 2008, 21:15

To explain a little more what I think has happened with last.fm we need to go back to when the company was founded years ago.

Start-ups are usually dominated by a few members of staff, they have been around from the start, share a core philosophy and are evangelical to the extreme about it to everyone else. The company usually begins by mirroring this belief system so last.fm will have been basically symbolic of the people who run it much like Digg or my own stuff.

These original few members will likely own the company. On paper their site becomes popular and they realise they are millionaires. They expand but there's only so far they can go before people start to offer stupid money. At some point they will sell up, everyone has a price - some people just have a higher price than others but in the end you start to see the money you're being offered in terms of being able to afford mansions, Aston Martins and private jets.

Once you sell up you then cede control to the buying party. These people have different ideas on where to take the business usually. They will send in new management, initially to "advise" and "consult" the founders, before gradually sidelining them.

Apple is a great example of this happening. Jobs got sidelined and then gradually made more and more insignificant. Endless suits ruined the evangelical vision he founded Apple with and it gradually lost its core values becoming more and more useless in the process - you can see how Bill Gates has been gradually shifted out of Microsoft and that is now on the same path of decline as the Old Apple. Somehow they brought Jobs back and he reconnected the company with itself creating New Apple.

With companies often it is the original leadership and vision that is one of the strengths but buyers forget this so as they takeover everything that made that company great gradually gets diluted more and more. You can see it in action now at its early stages with last.fm. It's something that Google struggles to retain with mixed results but at least Google realise how important it is to not be evil etc.

The web is littered with such disasterous takeovers, Friends Reunited being a great example of how a large media company can bugger a popular website into the ground. What you're really dealing with is a shift of control and differing ideas of core values between the founders and the buyers with the users being piggy in the middle.
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* tazru333 said...
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* Subscriber
* 22 Jul 2008, 21:38

This is a very olde problem actually. The suits are worse than parasites in nature, they know that it is in their best interests to keep their victims alive. Bad management can ruin any good thing, good management can do well even with a mediocre product. I've seen so many things start out with such enthusiasm and dedication by innovative people who then needed to make money to keep it alive. That was when the troubles started, they let some suits in, and the only enthusiasm and dedication they have is greed. Many times the old innovators left to start new projects, then end up selling that one too. I was in on a start-up in the late 1970s, it was a Music Mag that tried to cater to the serious fans and artists. We tried to keep it that way and ran out of money, our competition is still there, big, and full of adverts and articles we would not have published. Not a real bad mag, just too commercial and mainstream for my tastes. I don't look at in very often, the adverts don't reach me, why do those suits think that niche markets are bad? They only think of getting the largest group of people, there are many people who chose not to run with the largest herd. I keep seeing that as an untapped market. I used to think that Last.fm was addressing that concept when I first joined. For a while there I thought that the niche market for Music and Independent Artists was back, even better than in the old days of the MP3 site.
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* gothicform said...
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* User
* 22 Jul 2008, 21:55

Last.fm doesn't even need ad revenue to sustain it. Here's an idea... be a music store, sell the music like iTunes. Stop being an affiliate and do it yourselves you morons. Go one step further, code yourselves some software like iTunes or Amarok so last.fm runs fully in its own dedicated desktop application and allows you to sync your playlists with your mp3 player as well.
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sorry for the unlinked copying, the quote function is broken still.

wow yeah. sorry to say but this is very disgusting indeed.

gothicform said:
Given they have seven million users passionate about music, (SEVEN MIlLLION!)

Okay, with all due respect to Last.fm they do not have seven million users. Is that what they claim? Friend of mine in the marketing business says all corporations exaggerate their Web traffic by about ten times (print newspapers and magazines do it too). Let's say Last.fm has more like a million users total, which sounds about right given their stats. But a user count is all registered users and only a percentage of any site's users are regular visitors.Last.fm is unusual in that a percentage of users scrobble but don't often visit the Web site. I know more than a few people who check in once a week at most, they only use Last.fm for the scrobble stats. So how do you push advertising to users who scrobble but don't visit the site......?

Oh and several people had wondered about who got the money from Last.fm - the founders are listed here, http://www.last.fm/about, I assume they got the money.

make a sticky somewhere:
get the free "adblock plus" for firefox / "safariblock" to keep your pages clean from this SpySite's commercialBombs ..

anyone wants to top my 70% cpu eaten by 1 page of last.CBS open ?

WorldFusionRadio_com said:
Many Last.fm users were willing to subscribe to support Last.fm because they believed in it and received something from it. If you lose their trust and respect, and that has already happened with some, then no subscription income from them, users decline, ad sales decline, and eventually CBS shuts down Last.fm.

I dunno what you're seeing on this site, but I'm finding subscribers are fairly few and far between. There's enough of them to be noticed, but there's also a lot of heavy users that are seeing the site for free. The fact is people don't want to pay, and they don't want to see ads either. If Last.FM started up a "user pay" model and said it was "for the benefit of our users as it will allow us to break free of the need for ad revenue" there would be a different lists of complaints, the same calls for boycott, and many people sitting in their arm chairs talking up how Last.FM doesn't know how to write a business plan. They are providing an excellent service, and they are giving it away to you. It's not a hobby, it's a business that employs several people who really do give a damn about the users, and really do come in and participate in these discussions. Ad revenue has been driving magazines, news papers, and several other forms of media for a very long time now. How is last.fm supposed to be above that? If people are so willing to subscribe, why aren't they subscribing?

well said dragon, many ppl is determined to believe the worst about last.fm intentions atm. Some of the critisism is good and justified, but its drowned in all these speculations.

greenwatch said:
gothicform said:
Given they have seven million users passionate about music, (SEVEN MIlLLION!) I would have thought morphing last.fm into a music store, not Facebook, is an obvious thing. With margins of say 10 cents per mp3 sale I think you'd probably make quite a lot.

Imagine if every single artist you could play on last.fm now you could actually buy a decent quality mp3 of? Let's face it, one of the reasons last.fm is popular is because iTunes cannot provide the sort of stats we geeks want. If you have a computer crash or database corruption you lose your stats from iTunes (something that's happened to me).

Last.fm should be running on a desktop, not a browser and they should be taking on Apple - 7 million users isn't a patch on iTunes 50 million but if iTunes are several billion a year last.fm should be selling hundreds of millions. It's not.

This would also eliminate the need for adverts on last.fm completely. Have you spotted any adverts in iTunes? I rest my case.
gothicform said:
Facebook, the largest of social networking sites takes about a three millon dollars a week and that's turnover, not profit. iTunes makes roughly 10 cents profit per song and sells billions of songs a year... this year it will likely make about 300 million dollars profit for Apple (perhaps more).

Just to clear up a fair bit of misconception that could arise from these posts.

This would be great, were it not for the fact that the iTunes Store has never been a money maker for apple, and is (and always has been) a loss leader designed to drive sales for hardware such as iPods/iPhones/Apple TVs etc. The same goes for movie sales/rentals, which are supposedly costing apple just over a dollar per movie.

Apple loses money (or at least did in 2003, and I doubt this has changed) on each song and video sold on iTunes.

When you consider the royalties that must be paid in addition to the cost of hosting and distributing relatively high quality audio files (especially considered to the low quality streaming last.fm currently provides), it's simply not that viable a proposition.