Last.FM Playlists – Best Music Widget Yet

Way back in September, 2006, I wrote a review of the Last.FM music chart widget.  It was only the fourth review that I had written for SexyWidget, and at the time, it was my favorite widget.  As I wrote in my review:

I have not found a widget that I appreciate more than the Last.FM music widget. Its key strengths are its ability to portray something unique about the publisher, the fact that it’s fueled by implicit and not explicit data, and the almost universal desire of folks to share the music that they’re listening to.

But the Last.FM chart widget was not without its weaknesses.  Again, from my same review:

The only possible knock that I can think of about this widget is that it’s a nice to have, not a need to have. It doesn’t provide any additional functionality to a Web page, like the Meebo Me widget, for example. If you fast forward two years to when every online business is pushing a widget of some kind, I can see adoption decisions being made along the lines of required vs. preferred. In this sort of a world, the content based Last.FM widget may lose out to a functionally based widget such IM or a shopping cart. By then however, I would expect the Last.FM widget to evolve to be an actual music player.

Well, a lot has happened since I wrote this review of Last.FM’s widget.  In October of last year, music community iLike introduced a widget that was superior to Last.FM’s music chart widget.  Instead of using a sporadically updating image widget, the iLike widget was made in Flash and updated dynamically.  More importantly, the iLike widget not only captured your implicit music listening history, but it was also a music player that played samples of the tracks. 

It took a little while, but Last.FM has struck back with the best music widget that I have seen to date.  The new Last.FM playlist widget allows members to set up playlists of at least fifteen songs that can be streamed, in their entirety, via a Last.FM widget.  They've also extended their neighbor radio functionality into widgets, and added a recently played widget. 

The only similar service that I have seen to the Last.FM playlist widget is the Streampad music player.  Streampad helps you build playlists consisting of hotlinked MP3 files that Streampad finds in RSS feeds.  As good as Streampad is, it has two significant weaknesses; 1) It seems to operate in a legal grey zone, as it enables single track, on demand streaming; and 2) My playlists are always breaking when MP3 files are taken offline.

Last.FM tries to get around the copyright issues by forcing each playlist to include at least 15 tracks, and shuffling the playlists when played.  Whether or not this approach can hold up to legal scrutiny remains to be seen.

As Last.FM is drawing from their DB of licensed music tracks, I don’t expect them to face Streampad’s problem of tracks being pulled offline.

In addition to serving as a distributed radio stations, the Last.FM playlist widget also extends Last.FM’s affiliate revenue model out to the edge.  Clicking on a track title displays an affiliate link to buy the album at a Last.FM partner.  As I write this article, this feature is not yet working – but it’s clearly built into the widget’s functionality.

I guess what I like most about this widget is that it takes Last.FM’s absolute best functionality – the ability to stream custom radio stations – and extends it to the edge.  With one fell swoop, Last.FM’s large user base has been enlisted as distributed DJs tasked to not only spread the Last.FM brand, but to extend its affiliate reach.

For more coverage on Last.FM’s playlist widget as well as their other new widgets, see Mashable, Widgets Lab and TechCrunch.  You can check out my Playlist in the right hand column.

Comments

[Rita C]

I guess that is getting closer to the answer I'm after. I've seen some sites that have a little slider that comes out, thinking it's a yahoo thingy.

What is legal. Obviously I could play public domain stuff through my instance of ssp, but I'd like to offer more variety.

Great article.
Ciao!
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