I was recently asked some questions about being an independent musician on Last.fm for an article at Smashingpumpkins.com. Though I have been promoting and making my material available on the website since March of 2008, it hasn't been until recent times that I have thought in-depth about the potential of the unique Last.fm format, which I personally favor over similar options; it is an essential accompaniment, though by no means an alternative, to one's own official website and MySpace Music page.

Last.fm is conducive to the needs of both the casual listener looking for some music recommendations and entertaining on-line radio stations as well as music-fanatics, musicians, and would-be music journalists (users have the ability to post their thoughts as journals). This is a place where people will put in a friend request based on your music taste alone. This is a place where you can put up your music and it can be heard. Many a MySpace Music profile sits unused and unvisited, or on the flip side is spammed into oblivion by artists that will add just about anyone in hopes of being heard (or is the page of such an artist!). Not to say that Last.fm is free from bot accounts, but they are those who are disregarding the real potential of Last.fm, which lies in the networking.

Last.fm has a music-networking system that, yes, even MySpace, the giant in social-networking, misses out on. iLike almost has it right (as it is integrated with Facebook), but there is something sterile and not quite as musician-friendly here. Speaking of sterile, Last.fm took quite a blow from their own community in July of 2008 after a full-scale layout change, despite protests from beta-testing users beforehand. Months into the change, there have been some aesthetic and functional adjustments which have helped a return to normalcy of sorts, and site traffic has begun a slow uphill climb once more (yes, according to Alexa's statistics, it had fallen significantly post-July).

With a profound emphasis on music-discovery, the heart of promoting one's music on Last.fm is adding relevant tags to the music, though one can attempt to game the system a bit by adding completely irrelevant tags (the tagging of The Beatles as 'indie' or Paris Hilton as 'metal'), though this certainly occurs on a smaller scale than effective tags. Tags can be genres, years, adjectives, personal tags (some of which have been adopted by others en masse, such as 'seen live', 'i am a party girl here is my soundtrack)- any words the listener finds fitting, really. Within the Last.fm radio client, users can then type in the tag of their choice, and let it play, allowing the music to be delivered to their ears with minimal effort, and many enjoyable returns. When listening to your personal music library or radio tracks, if you choose, you can add any number of your own tags to the track currently playing. And so it goes, on and on and on, building an impressive user-generated catalog of music descriptors for the use of the Last.fm community at large.

Upon uploading your music to Last.fm, researching the tags of artists you find similar to your own style will clue you in on tags to use for your own tracks. By using a large number of appropriate tags on each one of your tracks and albums, you increase your chances of appearing on the tag radio station in question, finding your music increasingly delivered to relevant listeners, automatically.

If you have a MySpace profile- how often have you gotten an add request from a band you dislike? Even if you hadn't heard of them before, upon reaching their page and hearing a song or two, it didn't mesh with your tastes- perhaps even more perplexing if you had listed your favourite music on your own profile! This is the reason why a great many MySpace users, regrettably, tick the box indicating that they 'do not accept add requests from bands'. If only MySpace had a music recommendation system akin to Last.fm!- this would be quite a boon to MySpace Music artists and allow for more real fans, not the mere numbers-gathering MySpace bands seem to be in love with.

The statistics portion of Last.fm may be what distract so many artists from the networking portion- there are the user charts of most-listened to bands and tracks and how many plays total, the artist pages with number of listeners and plays, top albums and tracks for the week, the big overall charts for the current week and back in time- numbers, numbers, numbers! This is valuable data. You may have your own ideas and influences, but after you tag your tracks and notice what your listeners are into, you can start to get an idea of who your target audience could be, and finding out a most-listened to track could be key in deciding what song to release as a single or free download. As far as the Overall Charts, the top artists may not be surprising, due to the volume of listeners, but through the ranks is much diversity.

There are even some 'superstars of Last.fm' who have gained sufficient notoriety within the network for their support of independent artists, including musinum (with his Chez Musinum group, and impressive variety of radio stations collected in The Radio Room), Pixieguts (an artist in her own right and group owner of Pixies Palace), and Babs_05 (owner of Central Point, a hub "where artists and listeners meet").

Put in the effort beyond uploading and tagging, and you can build some valuable conections. Through Last.fm, I have connected with some like-minded individuals who have become contributors to the music blog I started in July of 2008, A Future in Noise, incredibly talented musicians (Panda steps in chocolate, Burnt Fur, Le Fils des Trois Mousquetaires, among countless others), and participated in much music discussion in a thriving atmosphere incomparable in scale anywhere else.

In other words: get on Last.fm, and be sensible about it, independent artists and labels!

• UrbanFox wrote ...

• at 12:55, Wednesday 25 March 2009

"You forgot to mention Blip.fm which offers a service similar to Twitter plus music. Independent artist can upload their material and send twitter like messages. The good thing, unlike Last.fm is that blip.fm tracks work like with Spotify: no buffering delays. Also Last.fm is plagued by kids trolling, never ending tech problems and very uncaring staff. Another plus for Blip.fm is that it can be linked live to Twitter and their widget works on most networks (exc.Last.fm which is the only one that insists on BBCode unlike HTML). So, all in all I think Blip.fm is likely to pass Last.fm in popularity and longevity."

• Marilyn Roxie wrote ...

• at 20:55, Wednesday 25 March 2009

"Oh, I love Blip.fm, but what it offers is something altogether different than Last.fm, and more of an additive than a substitute (since you can set up your account to scrobble tracks to your Last.fm profile), and quite a few of the mp3 files for the tracks are pulled from Last.fm free download links! I do think that the staff at Last.fm perhaps would have been wise to wait a bit longer before completing the Beta testing (after all, the Bring Back the Old Last.fm group still has 10,000+ members), but over the past few months, they've made quite a few improvements to get things back on track (I haven't encountered the buffering problems as of late), though I really wish they would have brought back Group Recommendations, since that's where several hundred of my listeners first heard my music. Popular artist shoutboxes do indeed have their fair share of drama, as well as certain groups, but overall, I think that the format of Last.fm is particularly useful for fostering the larger-scale networking and accessibility to music that musicians and labels depend on for growing their fan-base."

• UrbanFox wrote ...

• at 08:23, Thursday 26 March 2009

"it will be fun to see how many ppl will drop Last.fm now that they will have to pay to listen to the radio stations. It will also be interesting to see the reaction of musicians once they find out they will have to pay for their music pages and for uploading their material...watch this space, hehe
Blip.fm is pretty good. You can do a small amount of socialising but dont run the risk of being trolled to death unlike on Last"

• pete wrote ...

• at 12:44, Wednesday 15 April 2009

"Got profiles all over the interweb thingy but I feel most at home on Last Fm, great place for indie artists and labels."

• NewbieDoo wrote ...

• at 15:10, Monday 20 April 2009

"As I can't stand the format of twitter, I also don't care for blip.fm. I much prefer Last.FM. I have had a few buffering problems, but then I have buffering problems with a few sites. Probably more to do with my computer than the sites. I have also never had a problem with trolls. Mind you, I don't interact a great deal, just mainly listen to music. I don't bother other users so they don't bother me would be a fair assessment of why I don't have troll problems. Like Pete, I have profiles on other sites and these are the ones I use for more social interaction. I was not aware that there is any charge for using Last FM. I have certainly never been asked to pay any money to them. "

• Jan wrote ...

• at 13:10, Thursday 15 October 2009

"Hi Marilyn,rnThank you for wise words! I have only just started getting deep into LastFM, as I am researching the ideal musicians' web presence in general. I am amazed at how little awareness there appears to be among many musicians, even about the existence of LastFM. One question: I assume your can upload your own music as a musician, ie. listeners cannot upload stuff?rnThanks, Jan rn(btw i like your music, will come back for more, on lastfm...)"

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• at 12:19, Friday 13 November 2009

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• Deathpodal wrote ...

• at 17:04, Thursday 19 November 2009

"Really interesting article and advice. I'll definitely apply it, and will be in touch when my promos are ready!"