Last.fm launched an embeddable radio widget today that lets you add a personalized Last.fm radio station wherever Flash widgets are accepted.
The widget can play in three modes: a stream of what songs your recently listened to on Last.fm, hand-picked tracks, or full songs of related artists based on your personal preferences. If you want to play specific tracks, you must seed the widget with 15 or more songs by different artists and play it in shuffle mode.
Personalizing a full radio stream is dead simple. You just feed their widget generator artist names, tags, or MySpace page URL. The widget we have below is based off of Tom’s MySpace page. If you’re a Last.fm member, you can create a widget based on your existing personalized Last.fm station.
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The new widget certainly lowers the barriers to getting your personalized music station, now easily available to non-members and providing a better experience than MySpace’s own highly restricted player. However, it also adds another point of Amazon affiliate sales for Last.fm.
There are several other music widgets online. Finetune has an artist radio widget. Pandora has an API for distributing music. MyStrand’s “Flash Chart” lets users stream their recently played songs to visitors. iLike’s widget similarly lets users display their recent activity. In a somewhat legal gray area, HypeMachine and RadioBlogClub let listeners craft play lists of songs pulled from servers all over the internet. Other embeddable widgets let user’s pull music from their online music library (TuneFeed, MediaMaster) or single songs (MOG, iJigg).
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Normally i would say enough with the widgets already, but I just tried this out. It really is kind of cool. Last.FM is getting very aggressive of late.
http://www.ebizmba.com
with the pending riaa royalty fees skyrocketing for on-line radio providers, is lastFM going to be impacted by the royalty fees? Also, how widgetizing this going to affect those royalty fees?
I’m not seeing any of the services flinch on the issue. The Boston Globe had a good article on the hike though.
http://www.boston.com/business.....net_radio/
“According to the federal panel’s decision, companies that stream music over the Internet will have to pay nearly 5 percent more for music they played last year. They’ll also see increases of more than 20 percent in each of the next three years.
Lam estimates that his company would have to pay as much as $5 million in retroactive fees for 2006, a year in which his company took in just $2 million in ad revenues. And Live365 would have to raise its prices to broadcasters to cover the fees for 2007 and beyond.
These royalties are different from the ones paid by traditional radio broadcasters, which go to music publishing organizations like ASCAP — the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Over-the-air radio stations do not pay royalties to the recording companies or the performers. But a 1995 federal law mandates that digital broadcasters, like Internet and satellite radio stations, must pay both publishing and performance royalties. So must traditional radio stations when they simulcast over the Internet.”
wow, this is really a great feature, putting last.fm even furhter ahead of their competition than they already have been. I really wonder though, how Last.fm is handling licensing & legal issues, esp. compared to Pandora, who recently have retreated from the non-US market. I always preferred Pandora for their superior recommendation service, but have started to intensify my use of Last.fm lately - their Web 2.0 / social features really rule. I’m especially interested in this, as I’m (co-)running a web-radio station myself (http://play.fm).
thx for the post, nick!
cool widget,
it’s also an alternative for those who used to use Pandora but who no longer can.
Wow. Nice. Now if only it would stream to my car.
bravo to last fm, but take a look at this new kid on the block
http://www.seeqpod.com very nice widget too
Great widget - last.fm really are excelling at what they do, and it’s the only social-network that I regularly use. I’ve always preferred last.fm’s music discovery to Pandora’s.
Another fabulous music tool is http://www.thefilter.com - and I’d like to see those guys get a widget out there.
DAVID MACKEY: Get a 3g cellular broadband card; for your laptop … * there it is.
- This seems big, - since I think internet radion can / is killing terrestial radio - anyone think big (clear channel etc…) is backing the internet fees?
-RB
Just FYI, The Hype Machine does not let you create custom playlists (nor are we planning to anytime soon). We like to think we provide context around the music discovery experience by not only letting you find interesting music (by new or already loved artists) but also letting you read about it by music bloggers who do it out of passion.
I’m not entirely convinced that allowing custom playlists won’t detract from supporting those music bloggers.
@Michael Kamleitner
i’m not so sure i would agree that pandora’s recommendations are better. last.fm’s database of artists and songs is much larger, therefore more detailed and obscure recs are available.
the new widget page is nice! this should really give them a boost i think.
hi, i just wondered, since i’d prefer just the cover of the last last.fm track to appear, rather than playlist, radio or quilt. just one 128×128 picture. i’ve seen it as a wordpress script, but i’d need it stand alone. any hints?