Yesterday, CBS sent out a press release touting the success of Last.fm’s month-old redesign, citing a 20 percent increase in unique visitors and a 36 percent increase in total minutes between June and July. Despite a few bugs on the day of launch, the redesign seems to be paying off. But why is CBS so keen on beating its chest when it comes to Last.fm?
Ever since CBS bought Last.fm in May, 2007 for $280 million, it’s been under pressure to justify the purchase. At the time of the purchase, Last.fm was running neck-and-neck against social music network imeem and music radio service Pandora.. Today, imeem is killing Last.fm (see Google Trends for Websites chart above), and Pandora is still holding its own.
Since CBS cited comScore numbers, though, let’s look at those. In June, 2007, the first month under CBS ownership, Last.fm has 2.5 million unique U.S. visitors. A year later, in June, 2008, it had 2.4 million. In other words, it had gone absolutely nowhere. In July, after the redesign, it had 2.9 million. Meanhwhile, during the same time period, both imeem and Pandora doubled to 7 million and 4.8 million unique U.S. visitors, respectively. And these numbers don’t include imeem’s widgets, which the company says reaches about four times as many people as its site does on a worldwide basis.
And in terms of time spent on each site (engagement), imeem is heads and tails above both, with visitors spending 295 million minutes on the site in July, compared to 56 million minutes for Pandora and 20 million minutes for Last.fm.
The comparison with imeem isn’t completely fair because it is a broader social network centered around sharing videos and photos as well as music, although music is its main driver. (In fact, it is leading the move towards advertising supported music streaming, with a more comprehensive catalog than Last.fm’s). And Last.fm isn’t doing so well against Pandora either, which is a more direct competitor.
So did CBS totally screw up its acquisition of Last.fm, or will the redesign be enough to put it back on track?
CBS itself isn’t the top network. last.fm is now a very small part of a big corporate structure. It doesn’t have to be first.
True, But it never hurts to compare the two and see if last.fm does go to the top in the future by some changes.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
On the plus side last.fm has a ton of great content like live performances and interesting old videos. (On the minus side I’ve found 90% of those on YouTube as well.) But it doesn’t come close to imeem in on-demand streaming of what you want, when you want it; nor does it come close to Pandora in terms of recommendations and discovery. I use imeem and Pandora for very different and specific reasons, and every now and then I check in with last.fm simply to see if they’re still kicking and if there’s anything new and interesting to check out. Rarely have I been impressed.
The real reason the comparison isn’t fair is because it looks inside the US only.
See:
http://www.goog...=all&sort=0
Exactly, this is a very unfair comparison to make. The global graph Maddo links to shows that last.fm has maintained its lead over imeem, and if you zoom down to the last 12 months, has even extended it since the re-design.
A poor example of sensationalism, Erick, I’m afraid.
It is a completely fair comparison. CBS sent out a press release saying how great Last/fm’s U.S. numbers were in July.
That kind of raises the question as to how well it’s been doing in the U.S. since CBS (a U.S. company primarily concerned with attracting a U.S. audience) bought it, and how well it is doing in the U.S. versus its competitor.
The post answers those questions.
That said, according to comScore, both imeem and Pandora are doing better than Last.fm on a worldwide basis as well.
That link points to searchs and not visits like the one in the main article does.
From a UK perspective, last.fm is, as far as I can tell, much bigger here. I’ve never really heard of imeem and neither has anyone I’ve spoken to, and Pandora isn’t available to us.
Plus, if they keep pumping out greate apps like the iPhone one then they’ll do fine
Point taken, I was hasty in defending last.fm (although I don’t use it very much).
The other graph, for search is about the same as the article:
http://trends.g...=all&sort=0
Still not sure that this means that imeem is going to “win” or outlast.
Good spot
Exactly what I was about to say. Pandora’s blocked here and the only time I ever hear about Imeem is on US blogs…
This is a horrible comparison. Last.fm’s largest user base is not even in the United States. Prior to CBS, Last.fm originated in the UK.
This article is basically saying “basketball is more popular than soccer because the United States watches more basketball” when in reality soccer is globally many times more popular than basketball will ever be.
Thank you. The world seen from the US, I do not stop to hope that TC as a portal will one day not only in special reports look beyond the “center of the world”.
The poll results are interesting of course – techcrunch readers and techies just don’t use imeem compared to last.fm or pandora, but these users are not representative of the general public. What’s hot in the blogosphere has no bearing on popularity of a site around the world.
Muxtape is a great and highly relevant example of this, it basicly took the imeem playlist, limited it to 12 tracks and all of a sudden the blogsphere goes nuts praising its minimalism and making all sorts of amazing claims about the site’s innovation and prospects. But since a hot launch in March the user numbers have steadily declined and never got to much more than a few percent of the visitor levels on imeem, last.fm or pandora.
Why would CBS value its acquisition based on competitors traffic? It’s a sign of a healthy market where they both hold a strong position.
Besides, last time I checked the only thing they had in common was that their social music sites.
last.fm is good at the social aspect but Pandora is better at playing music I want to hear.
I think that pretty much sums it up.
Page visits are a really stupid way to gauge last.fm’s audience, because that isn’t its usage model.
For example, every time I play any piece of music at home, I log it on last.fm automatically–but that doesn’t get counted as a page visit, because it’s done via automatic plugin software.
Actually visiting last.fm’s web site is something I only do once every week or two.
I’d never heard of imeem either.
I agree. I use the last.fm desktop app way more than the website, it scrobbles my music 8-10 hours a day, but only visit the website once, maybe twice, a week.
For me, my radio station is better than Pandora too.
Plus, going to iMeem’s site and seeing a 90210 (the new version) ad made me immediately leave. I think they just appeal to fundamentally different core user bases, which means that last.fm will always have a place.
‘On the plus side last.fm has a ton of great content like live performances and interesting old videos.’
‘Besides, last time I checked the only thing they had in common was that their social music sites.’
Statements like this pretty much corroborate the poll results that show that only 5% of techcrunch users favour imeem.
Since imeem builds a lot of its catalog from user uploaded content you’ll find all those rare alternative versions, live performances and remixes all carefully uploaded to imeem. Imeem pretty much owns the game when it comes to music content now, last.fm’s on demand catalog comes from what the record labels are licensing and that is a lot more limited.
As for the similarities between last.fm and imeem just look at the media options – on demand streaming, instant playlist, related music, videos. Really these are media-centric sites and they both share so many features that they’re clearly going fo rthe same audience.
Any chance of getting non-US numbers? I switched back to Last.fm from Pandora here in the UK since we got blocked and more and more people I speak to, not just in the industry, are using Last.fm and loving their iPhone app as well.
I use Pandora and Pandora only. There is too much crap on socially driven music sites. I want the facts on artists. Their bios, their music videos, their albums, their singles, stock photos, lyrics, tabs, concert dates, etc. I don’t want all the clutter.
For instance…Kanye West, has only three studio albums (which can be seen on his website – http://www.kany...niversecity.com). However when you visit Last.FM – http://www.last...ye+West/+albums there are 4 Pages of CRAP
The reason I don’t like Last.FM or Imeem is because they are a bit to user driven. The companies don’t have enough control of whats actually being displayed. I’m probably alone on my opinion, but it’s just that; my opinion.
that’s basically the difference between pandora and last.fm right there. pandora is for people who want to hear whatever the RIAA is spending millions of dollars marketing, last.fm is for music fans who want to listen to actual music (or CRAP as you refer to it). last.fm has almost ANY band with a studio release, pandora hardly has anything that wasn’t produced by a millionaire record exec.
No, thats not what I was talking about. I used Kanye West as an example because lots of people know him. I’m not backing Pandora for artist exposure. You’re right, most all of the stuff on Pandora is mainstream music. Here is another analogy… Last.FM looks like MySpace where as Pandora looks like Facebook.
The CRAP i’m talking about, is not different types of music, its the junk that clutters artists pages. Let’s look at Lupe Fiasco for instance (you’ll probably hate on this EXAMPLE again). If you look at his website and his “Albums” – http://www.lupe...o.com/music.php you will see that he only has TWO CDs. However when you look at his “albums” page on Last.FM you see that he has two PAGES of albums – http://www.last...+Fiasco/+albums How can that be? Look there are three “albums” called “Daydreaming”. Last I check that wasn’t an album of his, yet it’s a single. And three of them on one page? This is what I mean by CRAP.
To discover artists I like using PureVolume. For me that is a substitute for having to lower my standards and use MySpace to listen to music. However many mainstream artists don’t have PureVolume.
You actually get my point in your later post. Last.FM isn’t simple enough. Thats what I’m getting at.
Thank God we can get our Kayne West albums.
Re: Non-US numbers
Both sites participate in Quantcast’s data gathering
http://www.quan...ast.com/last.fm
http://www.quan...t.com/imeem.com
But last.fm (or more likely CBS) have disabled some of the data displayed on their pages so you can’t really tell what its numbers are outside the US
But more interestingly they have the CBS Network and imeem network pages
http://www.quan...p-51jhoCdjGFIVU
http://www.quan...p-03Kgz0RV6Ztmc
If I’m reading this right, and this data is right (neither of which is necessarliy a sure thing) then these numbers imply that imeem gets more visitors than all of CBS’s properties.
It wouldn’t be the first time last.fm has put out a puff-piece masquerading as a press release.
Last.fm are in a bit of trouble. Their “redesign” actually took away several key features and made the site harder and less intuitive to use. On top of that they lost the warner catalogue deal. Even accounting for that I notice that not many new tracks have been hitting their database recently.
But on the upside, their core feature set is market leading, much more rich than Pandora’s or Imeem’s, so if they pull their finger out, there’s no reason why they can’t regain no.1 status.
soooo tired of the UK readers saying that because something is popular in the UK, that it’s wrong to judge a site’s popularity by US traffic.
imeem and pandora are bigger and more popular than last.fm in the US. nuff said…
don’t believe the bebo and last.fm hype machine that comes out of the UK. not a lot of “there” there
I don’t like imeem. And I love last.fm, have done for a looong time.
I have the last.fm app steaming on my desktop 8 hours a day, and another few hours a week on my iphone. I can’t remember the last time I visited the website. It would be interesting to see numbers on who’s actually using these services and how much music they have.
Also, if you’re going to compare a streaming radio service to some social networking site that happens to have music, isn’t myspace the dominant “online music service”?
The last.fm site redesign is the suck. I used to hit that site for info on upcoming events. It *used* to look in my profile and realize where I live and then show me local shows that I might actually attend. Now it seems to want to show me upcoming shows in Poland and Finland. WTF? You know my zipcode, stop making me type it in! Fail.
I also liked the old way they had graphs and charts on what was being scrobbled and so forth. The new ones are pretty dumb.
Pandora is the streaming music solution though – can’t be beat. I go back and try last.fm once and awhile (via a player, not the website), but it keeps on playing crap I don’t like. And then it adds that crap to my “library”. Not cool.
I get annoyed for the same reason. Crap I don’t like getting added to my library .
I’ve been using another CBS product call Play.it and absolutely love it. It lets you build a station based on Artist (like Pandora) but also lets you listen based on genre. Another interesting aspect is that radio stations are integrated into the site. Its in beta right now but if you want to check out the player go to KROQ.com.
last.fm focus is right
they just simply need to translate stuff into
Spanish/German/Japanese/Chinese
yes all of them Pronto
the site is pretty nice but failing on pulling in the facebook crowd which it could do a bit better on (their app fails alot)
and improve the event stuff
(alot of that comes down the region / translation focus )
simple to say hard to do
regards
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
All I know is I went to Imeem and the first thing I see is a giant ad for the new 90210 show on CW network. That’s all I need to see to know that Imeem is not the site for me.
Does anybody know if all these traffic-valuing sites incorporate Worldwide results? How do they count visitors?
As mentioned above, last.FM is JUST NOW trying to carve out a niche in the US. They have an empire over in Europe. They’re gradually gaining traction in the US and I do believe they’ll catch on here soon enough.
DEEZER.com is THE KILLER APP
I do not see in the posts http://www.deezer.com
It is the most powerful free streaming music in Europe with over 8 million unique visitors and growing like hell.
Deezer is really far more powerful and interesting than last.fm and imeem. you should test it and play with it.
It will become the largest music service on Internet within th enext 18 months.
I agree 100%. Deezer is far more user-friendly and gives you much more control over the music you listen to, while still letting you discover new music.
I enjoy last.fm and use it more than Pandora or Imeem by a factor of 10 (at least). That said, if I had started playing music with Imeem I probably would never had switched to, or used last.fm — it’s better looking, easier, and has some functionality (listening to the same song) that are not readily available within last.fm.
I’m not a big fan of the new redesign…I don’t think it helps much when compared to Imeem — the glue that needs to be the focus is in creating friends. And widgets (like the iphones). Still don’t understand what CBS’ goal is. Seems as if they’re playing in a sandbox (music and community) that is not their central competence.
MySpace is still the #1 social music site. Most artists use their MySpace pages as their official sites now, and has by far the largest and most cohesive community. I don’t see the need for another social music site except for streaming music and recommendations (Last.fm is the best right now) or in-depth discography/lyrics/tour information (google/wikipedia is the best right now).
Pandora – Very limited music selection, a toy for very casual music fans.
Last.fm – Too complicated to navigate and customize.
Imeem – Maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t understand what the point is.
imeem seems like Yet Another Social Network, with the ability to upload badly tagged MP3s you have on your hard drive. It is very much not to my taste. So it doesn’t seem fair to compare Last.fm, Pandora and imeem. If you were going to, why not add in MySpace?
Manually building playlists sucks when you have a music collection that is only part-ripped and still takes up over 100GB – the passive data collection model for Last.fm is what sells it for me. Once the Scrobbler is installed I get lots of value for very little effort.
Pandora – before the UK lockout – didn’t seem to work as well for me.
Of course, the technical superiority of the Last.fm service does not account for a gazillion US teenagers all busy expressing themselves through the medium of profile templates and badly tagged MP3s… match point to imeem.
I can’t believe nobody here gets imeem, let me put it to you in 3 simple words
imeem is *youtube for music*
On youtube anyone could upload ads from the TV, clips from movies, montages of tv shows and all sorts of random crap. But it had to be a video
imeem lets you upload any music by any band you like, and then share it with your friends.
Once you think about imeem like that you realise why it’s such a popular place, regardless of the technological mastery or lack thereof that it brings to the game, they’re simply doing what most sites were too afraid to do.
CBS has some pretty good music domain names now (mp3.com, radio.com), so maybe there will be some integration.
I use Last.fm and really like it’s features. I’ve discovered music via Last.fm that I would never have listened to (or bought) otherwise.
I’m not familiar with the other two sites and since I’m in Europe I can’t use all of them anyway.
Nice redesign, but every other page I hit has a script error.
i think looking at numbers is somewhat misguided. User numbers are worth nothing unless you can monetise them and I can’t see a reason why I (as an advertiser) would buy imeem over last,
lastfm has a much more compelling offer for advertisers than either pandora or imeem … which ultimately dictates how profitable it is.
imeem is functional but what does it stand for? What does the imeem brand mean to advertisers? Lastfm has a brand.
I’m not a heavy user of Last.fm but I do use it on a weekly basis and really love it. I also have an imeem account that I never use, but maybe it’s worth a second look. And I hear they have some cool stuff coming in the near future.
I logged in to Last.fm after not having visited the site for 3 years. To my surprise it has been keeping tabs on each and every song I’ve been listening to since I originally signed up.
Although I removed their software 3 years ago, it still left a dll in the Winamp plugin directory that has been reporting my activity.
This is a serious breach of privacy.
Or a serious OVERSIGHT by you.
Better lock your doors.
Sure, I should have read the terms and conditions where it says that when I un-install the software it actually stays on the computer and goes into stealth mode.
Last.fm is missing:
- multiple artist/tag/song name selection like pandora
- multiple playlists
LastFM’s forum is brimming with angry users these days. To me, the biggest disappointments of the past few months are LastFM’s new limit on 200 music files and, of course, the loss of Warner-related artists. About a third of my library was wiped out. Litmus test: Can you get the Beatles or not. LastFM’s youthful lack of communication skills are only making matters worse.
They’re two totally different sites with distintc approaches. Launchcast is more similar to Last.fm than Imeem (which is not even a radio service). It’s like to compare Facebook and Livejournal.
I listen to streaming music over last.fm for serveral hours a day, using their desktop and iphone apps. I haven’t visited their website in months.
This comparison of website hits seems as relevant as judging the success of a radio station success based on how many people have seen their commercials on television.
Last.fm appeals for the broad range of lesser known, indie bands, etc plus the recommend system works amazingly well. But the iPhone app is the topper… Especially in the car on the commute home. Great sound quality, streams well over 3G, etc.
Without the desktop and iPhone app — I doubt I’d be as big a fan of Last.fm. The website only appeals to me to review my growing list of “loved” songs, for future purchases/downloads to my personal music collection.
i think i like pandora the best of the three.
-rich @ Sports Basketball
oh traffic