valadiléne

No, don’t get me wrong, I love Last.fm.
I’ve been a subscriber for years and I’m really happy with it — my profile reflects my music taste just fine and I always discover new stuff through the recommendation system. It has clean interface (unlike some other social sites out there), okay people (haven’t seen much trolls there) and the whole idea of scrobbling music building my profile is very appealing.
I really shouldn’t complain about it, but… okay, here’s my list of reasons why Last.fm sucks, at least a little bit.

• New design: In July 2008, the folks at Last.fm decided they absolutely had to rebuild the site’s design from scratch. This apparently seemed like an okay idea — too bad they fucked it up. Bugs everywhere, slowness, and overall it’s just plain ugly when compared to the old good design. At the time several groups and petitions were opened against the site change, and someone even made a Greasemonkey script to bring back the old look & feel (although it needs a lot of imagination and some template features are just impossible to reproduce). At first, even some website features were missing – some of them have been fixed (Paint it Black, Reply Tracker, Neighbours, gif support), some of them still aren’t there (list is too long, view “Things we would like to have back” in the Bring back the old Last.fm group).
• Support is incredibly slow: People at Last.fm are obviously working hard to fix stuff, but there are some things I just can’t explain. Some major bugs, like the track upload issue which occurred in November 2009, or less important but still incredibly annoying bugs like the image charts server not working (December 2009 – still not fixed) are just a few examples of problems that take a shit-load of time to get fixed without any apparent reason.
• Free radio for US, German and English users; paid for anyone else: Since April 2009, Last.fm changed their policy regarding free radio listening. That’s what the blog post said: ] “[...] In the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, nothing will change. In all other countries, listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month.” When this happened, just like for the design problem, thousands of users complained on groups and forums and a lot of them stopped submitting data or even cancelled their accounts.
• Artists with the same name: Did you know that there are ten bands in the world all named Atrox? They make completely different genres from progressive metal to industrial, from punk rock to black metal. Well, believe it or not, on Last.fm all these bands share the same page. They share the same photo gallery, the same tag cloud, the same shoutbox, the same events box and, of course, the same listeners. What were they thinking when they designed this? I don’t know. Anyway, if you are curious about other bands sharing the same page, check out this group.

Okay, other than all this, Last.fm is cool. I’ve always been using it since the Audioscrobbler days, and even if I was kind of desperate when the new shitty design went live (just like anybody else), today I’m still a paying subscriber anyway – so I can say I am definitely addicted to it. If you don’t know about it, you should definitely check it out. And as for the radio thing, there’s a 30 days trial period so you can try it for free before subscribing. Happy listening!