Festivals 2010 beta

Hi all,

Today we’re excited to introduce a new Last.fm Festivals section. It's designed to help your scrobbles work harder to find the best festivals for you and your friends to attend this year, wherever you are (or want to be!) in the world.

You can get a broad overview of the new stuff on our blog, but here's some more detail:

• You can now toggle between browsing all events and just festivals from the main events page. There’s also a new location navigation tool so you can easily jump from place to place.






• If you’re logged in, you’ll see a compatibility score for each festival. This is a comparison of how many artists in your library are playing at the festival, and also uses a tag-based judgement of your taste against the artists in the lineup. You can sort the listings by compatibility to easily find one you'll love.




• Once you’ve found a festival that looks interesting, you can use the new festival page that includes a list of recommended artists to see. There's also links to flights, accommodation, and tickets to the festival, forums to talk with other attendees, and more.




• You can flip between your personalised lineup and all the artists playing, or filter the lineup by tag. You can also print or email your personalised lineup as a handy guide for when you’re actually at the festival.






We’ve got more festival functionality cooking in the Last.fm Labs but we’d love to hear what you think so far. We'll do our best to answer your questions in this thread (apologies if we're quiet during the wee hours in London), and we'll be listening carefully to all comments, criticisms, bug reports, and ideas.

Your compatibility algorithm seems faulty, I get weird results. By 'weird' I mean I get high compatibility for festivals I wouldn't even consider going to, and low compatibility with festivals that are a "must see" for me.

Good idea!

Would be nice to highlight events I'm already attending (currently it doesn't).

And if I attend this event, it says "1 days to go!" at the top - should be "1 day".

ookay, here goes the things that are a mess:

- the lineup recommendation feature - it's all nice and shiny, but the one with the top artist being highlighted and pictured was sort of better and clearer.

- the shoutbox layout - longer messages are painful to read, curable by moving/removing the next thing i'm whining about

- the recent activity feature - not really essential, hardly anyone shows interest in that

- attending friends' names are highlighted. should have been the whole friends' profiles backgrounds

and the things i actually happen to like:

- the countown timer, always wanted to have one ;D

- the recommendation feature, really helpful, but i'd to it by adding tabs like the ones in profile charts to the old lineup feature.

all for now, boy, my criticism is lame ;)

edit: oh, yes, forgot about the shout counter with a link to the top of the event shoutbox, that was really useful.

BeZet said:
Your compatibility algorithm seems faulty, I get weird results. By 'weird' I mean I get high compatibility for festivals I wouldn't even consider going to, and low compatibility with festivals that are a "must see" for me.

Please give us specific examples and we'll work to improve the service - it's a brand new algorithm so the more feedback we get the quicker we can improve it. Thanks for your help!

One thing I noticed:

In the discussions section some discussions that were there seem to have disappeared.
And when you click the "See more/new thread' link it redirects you to the general last.fm/forum page instead of a forum for the festival

I liked the design but wanted to suggest that the poster of the festival are bigger like before!

I'd like to be able to sort festivals by distance from my location but browse my whole country at the same time.

i don't like it ;/

On the main festivals page, maybe it'd make more sense for each festival to list the artists you like, rather than the headline artists?

An example of why: when I view all UK festivals, sorted by compatibility, the second result from the top is Summer Sundae, and underneath it is the artist list:

Tinchy Stryder, Krystyna Miles, Kirsty Almeida, Alex Highton, These Furrows, Pokey LaFarge & The South City Three, The Guthlaxtones, el pussycat and 63 more…

There's only one artist there who I've ever heard of. And they're not an artist I like.

If I actually click through the event page, it then displays the 'recommended lineup' for me - that has 4 bands I love, and quite a few others I'd certainly be interested in seeing. So the recommendation of that festival isn't too bad, but from the main page of the festivals section it looks like an absolutely terrible choice which I'd never have clicked on were it not for the bemusement that comes from being recommended I go to a festival with a bunch of artists I've never heard of, and Tinchy Stryder.

Displaying the recommended artists list would seem more sensible. It'd make it easier for events to catch your eye without having to click through to the individual event page for each one.

Feature as a whole, though = awesome.

Hello, it would be great, if there was a third view for the lineup where artists are sorted by listeners like before. Otherwise you'll always have to look through the whole lineup if you just want to see if any famous artist were added.

I also can't find a link back to the event from the "Edit Event Listing" page any more.

The new features seem useful.

Thanks!

Thanks for the reports and feedback! We're already looking into some of the bugs you've caught, keep it coming...