To me last.fm is the ultimate for musicians to get heard. Especially if you put forth the same effort that you do to promote your myspace and/or imeem accounts. A while ago I wrote a post on my blog comparing ReverbNation vs MySpace vs Imeem vs Last.fm (tyshowers.blogspot.com/2008/10/reverbnation-vs-myspace-vs-lastfm-vs.html) from a musicians perspective. The post mostly concentrated on ReverbNation and my experiences. I too am learning music marketing as I go, so I thought it would be helpful to share what I know about Last.fm here, especially since a lot musicians don't know about Last.fm and can get heard with very little effort.

First a little background on Last.fm. Last.fm is constructed like a customizable radio station. You create an account, add artist to a library, and if their music is available (has been uploaded to last.fm) you can listen to the library as a radio station anywhere. (It's like having a mobile iTunes. Which is very cool, you can free up a lot of hard disk space by keeping your library on last.fm.)

In the same vein, artist have their own radio station, where you can hear similar artist to the artist's radio station you've chosen (this works 90% of the time).

The key to last.fm though is "tags". Music is tagged on last.fm by users with accounts. Tags are also used as radio stations, so if I wanted to listen to say "chilled jazz", I just type the tag "chilled jazz" in the radio player and those are the types of songs I would hear. Tags describe an artist, album or song. The more of a certain tag an artist has, the more likely the artist is to be heard using that tag. For example, some of my music is tagged "electronic jazz". Since I have been tagged with this label so much, a user wanting to listen to "electronic jazz" will more likely hear a lot of my music.

As a last.fm musician, the goal is in the following order:
- Get your tracks played
- Get your tracks, and your profile tagged
- Get your tracks loved
- Get your tracks play-listed

Friends can help you do all these things. And this is what I've discovered, the more you get played and tagged, the more last.fm will recommend your music, thus creating more plays. For example if you only have 300 plays and 30 listeners you might get recommended twice a month. Meaning when someone has a radio station tuned to say "Mariah Carey", and your music has been tagged with similar tags as Mariah Carey, you may get heard twice a month.

I love electronic music so when I type in "electronic" in the radio player, I hear a lot of the artist Moby. Why? Because he has been tagged thousands of times with "electronic". So you're probably wondering how you can compete? Well there are all types of tags, here's an example for "chill out" music, there are tags like "chilled, chillout, electronic chill, chill, etc.". Even typos can help.

I have not been shy about promoting other artist on last.fm. I have added many myspace artist to my library. I try and give an artist plays whenever I can, when I'm cooking, sleeping (leave my computer at night playing my library) or working. Now if every artist on this forum did this to each other can you imagine the results? Sometimes I discover artist I would not have heard of before and buy, such as Jamella Bullock and Jan'ell.

I've only come back into the music business since June and I posted my material on last.fm around July. Currently as of this posting I have about 1,000 listeners and 6,600 plays. I notice every month, the more my count goes up, the more I'm recommended in other radio stations (I'm recommended about 7 times a day, my immediate goal is one an hour). You can also compare stats to other artist and look at their listeners to see how you compare. This is how I determined that as your play count goes up, the more you get recommended. I have noticed artist with 10,000 plays get slightly more recommendations than me and of course artist with 1,000,000 plays get recommended all the time.

So if you're interested, I will definitely put you in my library and give you some plays and you do the same for me.

Imagine if people (friends, members of this forum, members of myspace) just started streaming our music through last.fm, just stream it consistently and every now and then tag it, "love it" and "playlist it", the play count will go up significantly on last.fm. Which will mean more listens, which eventually lead to additional sales.

In conclusion, last.fm is different than all the other sites for independent musicians in that you get recommended. Imeem, MySpace and ReverbNation do not recommend you. You have to do all the work yourself. You have to find your audience. On last.fm, they help audiences find you.

This is much appreciated information. Thank you for sharing about Last.fm. This was the first I had heard about it and I am going to go and check it out right now.

Cordially,
Felicia

This is an excellent post!! Thank you, Ty, for contributing.

I would also add that Last.fm is beneficial in that it allows artists to actually get paid for the amount of times that they get played. To get paid by Last.fm, what you have to do is register with them as an artist or band (after you set up a basic account) and then tell them if you want to get paid directly or through Soundexchange (for the U.S.). you should definitely choose to get paid directly by last.fm since Soundexchange is mostly focused on the big broadcasters like XM and Sirius. they currently aren't getting any info from last.fm according to someone that i spoke to at Soundexchange.

Another good ascpect of Last.fm is that you get to control your artist page. In fact, they have a Wiki and anyone can go on and edit the bio or add pictures. This is not as scary as it sounds. Sometimes fans have a different perspective on your music and they can notice attributes that you aren't really focused on. One of my frustrations with imeem is that you have no control over your artist page. Mine currently has no photo and only has one of my releases listed. I've contacted imeem about this and they are looking into it. I'm going to post a link to Ty's post on my blog (which is all about navigating the digital music marketplace) in an upocoming post about Last.fm (hopefully i'll get that up today).

So i urge all members of this forum (and anyone else that you can pass the info on to) to get registered on Last.fm. Be sure to type in the name "Ty Showers" as well as "Desmond Williams" and any other members of this group and lets get those numbers up.

btw - Last.fm is free to join and use.


Thanks again, Ty.

Please refrain from posting responses that are just a long list of images. This forum is about information and we don't want folks to have to scroll through a bunch of images to get to it. We appreciate your participation so don't take it personally.

Thanks,
Desmond

ty man your post rocks thanks for sending me check u later

thanks for shareing

cool thanks for sharing

Thanks for this blog. You've led me to some really great post TY. interesting.

Thank you for sharing that information. I'm about to go check out the last.fm site. I'll get back to you all and let you know how it works for me. Thanks again.

Musically yours,

Von Sway

really cool ty tinas!!!!

Aight... I'm on there (i think)... the site looks and feels new.... like it's a beta version... and it confused me at first.. but i think i got it. Ty Showers... look for me... Top Billion... and umm... if i can figure this crazy site out i'll play in u my radio thing or however it works... just holla...

get at all of my music pages of course this imeem page im on rite now have my songs on myspace
yrome1@yahoo.com
bmg_get_money@yahoo.com
you now check it out thanks for the help pimp my song group glad i joined

Thanks for the post, not an artist but my baby is so I sent it to him. By the way Ty, I love Chicago!!!

for sure man, keep doing your thing your music is awesome and I love listening to it on "chill dayz"... but yeah Lastfm is legit dude, its pretty much a step above everything else out there

Thanks Ty. You're right. Last.fm is good. I'm on there. I should take some of your suggestions and put more effort in to promoting my music on there. I had a little bit of a strange experience with Last.fm at the start. If you sell your CDs on www.cdbaby.com, and allow them to sign you up for digital distribution and online radio websites, one of the sites that gets your music is Last.fm. I didn't even realize I was on Last.fm until I googled my name one day. So then I created an account and took control of my CDs that were already on Last.fm, but I couldn't modify some of the things for CDs that had already been submitted by www.cdbaby.com. The reason was that www.cdbaby.com was already setup to collect royalties for me. I could be wrong, but I think if you're a member of ASCAP and register your songs with them you can collect royalties for plays on Last.fm. Just being a member of ASCAP doesn't cut it. I think you have to actually register all your songs that you hope to collect royalties on. I've only registered one of my songs with ASCAP because I had licensed it for TV. I've received some royalty payments for that. I have yet to get paid royalties for online playbacks, but I think it's possible if you go through the trouble of registering each song.

yes you should definitely register each song individually with ASCAP or BMI, but they don't pay you for online perfomances (last.fm or imeem). there is an organization that is meant to collect for digital perfomance (Soundexchange.com) , but at this point they're focusing more on the big digital broadcasters, like XM and Sirius so i would definitely suggest that you take advantage of the feature of last.fm that lets you get paid directly by them. if you wait for them to report to Soundexchange, it might be quite a while.

i actually spoke to Jeff at Soundexchange (had some questions about my catalog) and he cleared that all up for me. one more thing, neither ASCAP or Soundexchange play for on demand services like imeem (meaning services where you decide and choose exactly what tracks you want to hear and when). only "radio" style formats like last.fm pay those kind of royalties. so, when you register for last.fm as an artist be SURE to choose to have them pay you directly and not through a collection organization.

i'm learning all of this as i go along so you should definitely so as much research about these things as you can. here are a couple of sources.

http://digitalmusicnews.com
http://newmusicideas.com/

i also write a blog which you can read at desmondwilliams.wordpress.com

peace...

oke, cool to share this kind of info.

Thanks.

I'll check it out and let you know.....

Great stuff here Ty, Thansk so much fr sharing this information, and your talents... I too am just learning about all of this new stuff... Man, blows me away, and by the time I think I am getting caught up, WHAM, I just find out how behind I am... Ever need a drummer, let me know!