commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

As a loyal user of Last.fm, I love checking on my charts as they change, and have been surprised to learn what it is that I listen to most (NOFX^{w | Last} apparently – maybe not such a surprise). They’ve had a lot of downtime the last couple of months, with chart updates being highly sporadic (as a result of which I was given a free month’s subscription last month; more on subscriptions later), and though I’ve enjoyed the service I’ve received and waited patiently, a glance at the forums reveals that a huge number of users have been thoughtless, rude, and impatient with the staff. This is really disappointing, and must be even more so for the staff and forum moderators who work on the site.

For those who haven’t heard of the service, you install a plugin to your regular media player, then whenever you play a properly tagged audio track, the data is submitted to Last.fm, who collate the information and produce charts of your listening habits. These charts simply hadn’t been updating correctly, but promises of upgrades and service improvements seem to have done little to placate many users.

I’ve thought often of upgrading to the subscription service offered by Last.fm, but never seem to do so, largely because the benefits just aren’t worth it. If for the same price I was getting what I have now, plus the benefits of the subscription, I would consider it more strongly, but since the free service is so good, it is not worth the expense (trivial though it may seem, at £1.50/month). The company are perhaps a victim of their own success in this respect. I’ll probably pay for a couple of months once this current (gratis) subscription expires.