Merging Last.fm and Spotify

Many of you have probably heard of Last.fm, and some of you have also heard of Spotify. These are both great music streaming applications. Merging these two would undoubtly produce something that is greater than the sum of it parts. But what would that look like?



First, a quick summary of the two:

Spotify (portmanteau of spot and identify) is a Sweden-based proprietary music streaming program, which allows listening to specific music without delay via browsing artists, albums or created playlists. Spotify currently cooperates with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard og Bonnier Amigo and more. So there is a huge selection of music that is just waiting for the user. There are exceptions though. You cannot find i.e. The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Metallica.

Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 21 million active users based in more than 200 countries. Using a music recommendation system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user's computer or some portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user's profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

Clearly, both of these applications have their advantages and disadvantages. With last.fm you cannot listen to spesific music unless you have these files on your own computer. You can however listen to music that's related to other music, that is i.e. if you like the american prog band Cairo (which is a great band) you can listen to a radio station named Cairo which contain similar artists. This is a great way to just explore new artists which you are more probable to like compared to random music, but you can't choose exactly what track to listen to. It seems that Last.fm has all the features that Spotify doesn't have and vice versa. This is no surprise however since Last.fm has built an application based on having access to the music through radio stations only. Having this as a starting point changes the focus and something more than a music player emerges.

The first step in the right direction has already been taken. On December 18, 2008, Spotify announced on their blog that they've added scrobbling as a feature in their application. Excerpt from blog:

Almost immediately after launch we started getting heaps of requests from people who wanted to be able to scrobble the music they were playing on Spotify to Last.fm (Last.fm is a cool music recommendation site for those of you who don’t know). The demand was so high that people started creating their own solutions to scrobble, which were cool but a little hard to install and run for the average user.

Spotify is not currently freely availible to the public. You can however get an invite if you have a little luck. Three hours ago the norwegian IT-website Hardware.no announced 100 free invites but they were taken away in just twenty minutes or so. There is a great demand. If you cannot get an invite, check out this article on downloading through a proxy (link).

We think the demand for better Last.fm integration will increase steadily as more users (especially Last.fm users) get to know Spotify a little better. There is reason to believe that Spotify will open to the public in the near future, and there's also rumours about an iPhone application being developed.