Last.FM has relaunched with some new features, included a Flash-based player… [see story by Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch].
I commented previously on the pros and cons of social-recommendation (Last.FM) vs ’sounds-like-this-based-on-pa…

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Marshall, as an avid reader of yours, I feel you could be more open-minded in this case — not only when you say “the new features are all about indy,” but also in your rejection of music that’s not endorsed by a major label.

I disagree with your statement “the new features are all about indy.” If you were reviewing GarageBand.com, this would be accurate. But it doesn’t feel accurate in your review of LastFM. (And it also wasn’t accurate when you said that about iLike — the primary focus of iLike is to help you find music with friends).

More importantly, while you’re entitled to your own personal music tastes, you’re assuming the public at large shares those tastes when you declare that all indie music is bad.

MySpace is the #1 music destination on the internet — and it’s not because they have the same major-label songs you find everywhere. Likewise, American Idol shows that mainstream audiences *are* interested in amateur performers (and many of those amateurs have developed into hits beyond the Idol audience).

If it works for karaoke pop singers, can it work for unsigned bands? To find out, we recently launched our own “reality show” on FM radio. As of this week, a dozen FM radio stations in the US, incl several major metro stations (NY, SF, Philly, Detroit, Vegas), are airing the “Garageband Faceoff” daily during *drivetime* (peak listening hours). Take a listen — you might like what you hear. You can stream or get the podcast at GarageBandFaceoff.com. It would be REALLY ironic if something that’s mainstream enough to reach millions of listeners on drivetime FM radio is too indie for TechCrunch.

It is hard to believe that I find myself having the long-tail debate with a blogger. Not long ago, professional journalists claimed “blogs are amateur and bad journalism,” and people like you proved them wrong. The same applies to music, as Internet distribution and cheaper recording tools are changing the game. The only difference with music is that systems for enabling the best indie music to rise to the top are still being refined.

Ali Partovi

Marshall, what music do you listen to – Kelly Clarkson and Backstreet Boys? You may be surprised that most music lovers’ #1 request on surveys is “new artists” or “not the same stuff I always hear on the radio”.

You may also have heard of this new site called MySpace, it’s pretty big these days, and a lot of people say it’s big because of the indie bands. I guess you probably don’t use MySpace, maybe the indie music there bothers you too, but you gotta face reality that it’s very very popular.

If your music tastes are so limited and so different from the average population, why are you even writing reviews of music sites?

You should check out Soundflavor DJ — http://www.soundflavor.com.

I love the Hype Machine and last.fm, but agree that there feels like something is missing on both services. Lately I have been playing around with Streampad: http://www.streampad.com and find that it really ties these two services together nicely. I installed the desktop software and now have remote access to my own music library. The way it ties together my library to mp3blogs as well as other people’s listening habits has lead me to discover a lot of new music (yes, indie music!). Streampad is not perfect yet, but I have read that it is just one guy, so it seems pretty impressive for where it’s at.

Flash player definitely helps – but I still find (i) performance hits/breakups when the Flash player window is in the background

This is an “undocumented feature” of the Flash player. It’s particularly annoying on embedded flash audio/video. The digital media playback doesn’t follow the window focus policy; try scrolling the browser window while a YouTube video is playing. The audio/video sync is better if the flash player is running in a pop-up window.

I’ve also noticed that opening several embedded flash apps in multiple tabs in a browser will eventually cause the stream in the current tabbed window to hang/freeze. Note that this will occur even all the media is stopped in all but the current tabbed window.

Quicktime (Mac) has a feature in it’s preferences that allows multiple media windows to open, overlapping and streaming; check “Play sound in frontmost window only” and “Play sound when application is in background”. The topmost/foreground window is the “active” window, and the media in that window becomes audible as I click between windows; the video in the bottom/background window continues to stream silently.

I don’t know if a similar feature is available in Flash players.

Have commented earlier on both last.fm and Pandora here

I think the future of these systems has to be a combo of useful “Get you going” data + social net + know more about people like me like X, not just people like X.

Try looking up “Cavendish” on iTunes sometime. Australian band, definitely on par with anything commercial. I caught them on ROVE Live last week (Australian TV show).

http://www.yout...h?v=9ghs9NtvBTE – is a clip if you’re keen.

You can’t tell me indie music is bad after listening to them.

It would be nice if sites like Last.fm also offered viewable music videos, especially considering the amount of music videos people want to watch on YouTube but are often restricted from by the big music companies. The best resource right now for watching videos is probably videos.antville.org, but I prefer, http://obtusity.blogspot.com, because they offer insightful commentary on the videos they post.