It’s Official: The “New” Last.fm Sucks Ass

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?