It’s Official: The “New” Last.fm Sucks Ass
21. July 2008 · Filed under: BlahBlahBlog · 12 Comments
Okay, maybe I am getting a bit worked up over the whole new layout thing, but it isn’t just the shitty new layout at Last.fm that is getting my panties in a bunch.
Here are my reasons for not liking the “new” Last.fm:
- The layout of the whole site isn’t very user friendly. This is a SOCIAL site and the comments are all the way at the bottom of the page. They used to be on the right sidebar. I like being able to read more than the last few comments, but they should have left the comments aka shoutbox on the side panel.
- I don’t need my new side panel to be so wide.
- All the white is blinding my eyes. Seriously. They should have at least given us some skins to choose from. Who knows? Maybe that is coming.
- My playlist had over 600 songs and I liked to listen to them play on shuffle when I was doing something. Now they have cut the limit to 200, which resulted in only the first 200 songs being on my playlist and I lost all the others. Bummer. While I can now have more than one playlist, it has to be at least 45 tracks by 15 different artists to even play it. What if I want a playlist with nothing but Jack Johnson or The Beatles? What if I want a playlist that may have many tracks, but it’s only 14 artists? Do I need to add a single track that I don’t really care about being on my list because I need that extra artist? WTF? Also, instead of one click to add something to your playlist, you have to go through a long drawn out process which is another pain in my ass.
- I’ve been having problems listening to music through the site. It constantly says buffering and then gives me an “Oops!” error, which I shouldn’t get considering that I AM a subscriber and one of the benefits of that is that I get to have priority on the servers to listen to music. For a whole day I couldn’t play music in the site, which the whole point of listening through the site is to listen to new artists or ones you haven’t heard before. Again, I must say, WTF?
- Recommendations. Now that pisses me off. I like to recommend music and get them in return. With the old layout, I was able to choose from a dropdown list of who I wanted to send the recommendation to or I could choose all my friends or a group with one click. Now I have to physically type in the user name, which is a pain in the ass because I remember names more than the user names, and I now will have go look up someones user name to type it in correctly to make sure it reaches the correct user. Also, it now gives the option to recommend something to someone through email, but while that may be cool, it smells like Last.fm is using it as a way to get more users to sign up.
While I do have more gripes about Last.fm, I am going to wait it out and see how they improve on this new design and listen to what the users are complaining about. I am hardly the only person to bitch about this new Last.fm.
What do you think about the new Last.fm? Love it? Like it? Hate it? Want the old design back?
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Tagged: Personal, Social Media, Thoughts
I agree! I can’t find anything on that site. I am hoping that they make some even newer changes… and quick! I stopped using that site (for the moment, at least) because of that!
Melanies last blog post..Cigarette Smoking in France
@Melanie: A lot of people are starting to find other music sites right now, but I am not sure if that will last long. Last.fm is a great site; it just seems like they are trying to make it a MySpace for music. Also, a lot of subscribers are probably not going to renew their subscriptions when they expire. I really hope Last.fm realizes this, unless they just don’t care, and if that is the case, then it’s pretty sad.
Are there any better music sites? I also had a very long playlist, but now I cannot even play it, it only plays 30s per song. It made me really pissed off that I spent a lot of time creating the list, then they take it away and say that I need to pay if I want to play it. They should have said that in advance.
@Ondrej: Someone said deezer.com is where they are going, but I am not sure how the site is beyond what I saw when I went to the link. You can try to check them out if you like.
I find that Last FM is very slow moving going from page to page. I don’t like the fact that I will pick a song & then listen to it & it is a live crappy version, or they don’t have it. Then there are songs in my library that I never picked from the artist.
Yeah I’ve found the same thing lately. The layout is less a problem as is the quality of tagging and what it considers to be “related artists” lately. The lack of any reasonable way to customize what you listen to is incredibly frustrating.
I’ve been checking out a few options since Pandora is a no-go in Canada (though if you can try that out). I’ve heard imeem.com is the fastest growing site outside of Pandora and Last.fm and from what I read has already overtaking last.fm. You get total customization of your playlists, any length, any songs. It seems the song selection is a little less complete though.
Oh well. Here to CBS waking up soon. Not likely though, you know I would have payed the subscription to get functional playlist and station customization features.
F. why can’t these sites reference/link ideas beyond the obvious?
Should I start my own site? Do these people not get it?
They play so safe, mostly staying in a time period, not realizing that we want to link the past to the present to expand.
I listen to great playlists by amateurs linking then old to the new in a seemless fashion.
What are these people doing? Give me some surprise, some link. Bore me more, please.
I haven’t been happy with last fm at all. I tried Jango.comand liked that. Seems simpler.
Last.fm is soooo last year. It used to be cool but the new version seriously sucks ass. The performance/nadwidth is abyssmal at best (cant play more than one track on any given station without buffer errors)
Of course all of this will be moot because once Spotify is launched, people will ditch Last.fm like a bad habit (yes, spotify is THAT incredible)
I’ve gotten used to the “new” Last.fm since they changed it. I am a subscriber and I have no problems with buffering or performance. I do love Spotify, tho.
I agree there are bugs aplenty in Last FM especially for a tech numpty like me. In their defence I have to say up to now they have provided a decent platform for indie labels to put out their catalog where it might get some decent traffic.
my biggest complaint is the the radio station. I have two accounts on Last FM one plays music continuously no problem, the other has a mind of its own and gives me error messages most of the time.
Don’t even get me started on sending out a mailshot to friends….virtually unworkable.
LastFM stopped offering free on demand full track streaming with their April 12, 2010 “update”, It was the kiss of death for them in a lot of users’ eyes. LastFM is just one more mediocre music site now with 30 second song previews. A lot of people have stopped using their site and a lot of people that stayed are protesting. The protest group there is growning every day and the moderators are watching it closely. It is like a police state there now. The site moderators are all on edge trying to stop the protesters and are banning people constantly. CBS had a real opportunity to improve the site but they are money lovers not music lovers so the service is pretty useless now…unless charts, stats and graphs are your thing. I prefer music.