Vodpod Blog

We thought it would be interesting to occasionally post here about some of the sites we really love, and that have influenced our thinking as we developed VodPod.

For me, there is no better place to start than Last.fm , a site we use extensively here in the office (ok, two of us use it, our third partner uses Pandora which is a fine service as well). Indeed, as I type this I’m listening to Last.fm’s radio player (playing now — Neko Case, Runnin’ Out of Fools ).

I was turned on to Last.fm by a friend in late 2004, while still living in London, and started using it in early 2005. It builds a music profile for you based on your listening habits, tracking what you listen to in iTunes (or similar software) while online. Once you’ve built your listening profile, you can meet others who have similar tastes (or not), visit their profiles, and listen to radio feeds built from the result of all this human activity (stations that play music related to your profile, based on “tags” or based on artists you like).

My usage of the service is relatively modest compared to my friends’; according to my Last.fm profile, I’ve listened to about 3700 songs since January 2005. That works out to about 25-30 minutes of usage a day on average, probably about one-third the amount of my friends’ usage on average.

What’s important about Last.fm is that it has totally changed the way I listen to music. At the office, I now rarely play any music from my collection, on my hard drive. Rather, I’ll tune into a Last.fm station (usually telling it to play music similar to three or four artists I like, or to play music by a specific tag such as “alt-country”). The amount of new music I’ve been introduced to in the past year has been astonishing. When listening to Last.fm, about half of the music I hear is new; either a new artist, or a new song by an artist I know. The ratio of “hits” to “duds” is almost always high. Of every ten new songs I hear, there will usually be 5-6 that I really like. In just the past 10 minutes, I’ve heard songs by two artists I’ve never heard before — Jesse Malin and Ariel Borgna. I liked both of them, and I’ll now keep an eye out for them in the future.

And wait, there’s more. The other great thing about Last.fm is that it captures the essentially social experience of listening to music. You and your friends can see what you’ve each been listening to. And in the past few months, Last.fm added a feature that allows me to see, in real time, what your friends on the service are listening to from your own profile. It’s a small, subtle change, but fun, addictive, and surprising and sometimes even revealing.

Nat Torkington today wrote about homophily — the tendency hang out with people just like you — and how social software can cause this in, perhaps, a bad way. Happily, Last.fm somehow manages to avoid this. Through people who have music tastes similar to mine, I’ve discovered a slew of artists through them (and my “neighbours” online) that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

In building Vodpod, we’ve tried to create a service where people help people to find videos that are interesting, relevant, and fun through and with others who have similar tastes and interests; and where the experience of both finding and watching those videos is essentially social. Last.fm has provided a lot of inspiration along the way, not to mention many hours of good listening. Playing now: Wilco .