New New Musical Express - November 2009

* Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport n/a anywhere yet. Tagged in hope.

* Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More you should know some of these tracks from last year's EP. Full tracks, tagged.

* Jay-Z - The Blueprint 3 (Explicit) Not in Last.fm yet. Listen in We7 or Spotify
http://open.spotify.com/album/03JboE7JdI2P2lZjzVFjUP

* Shirley Bassey - The Performance Superb album of songs written for the diva by luminaries such as Rufus Wainwright, John Barry, Gary Barlow, Pet Shop Boys, Tom Baxter, KT Tunstall and more. Further info. Sensational. Full tracks. Tagged.

* Adrian Crowley - Season Of The Sparks introspective, autumnal, morose fireside music for when the wind's howling. Ghostly beautiful. Not in Last.fm yet. Link to Spotify
http://open.spotify.com/album/7AuvCYHMW9rwUgyXbawJoq

* Stereophonics - Keep Calm and Carry On Tagged in advance of release. Innocent is their best song in years.

* Smokey Robinson - Time Flies When You're Having Fun with inspired cover of 'I Want You Back' as the last track. Full tracks. Tagged.

* Lissie - Why You Runnin' 5-track EP. Pretty folk/country/rock. Reminiscent of KT Tunstall but more intimate. Full tracks. Tagged.

* Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - 2009 Listen to these three tracks before they get over-hyped. Quirky, creative modern hippies led by former singer of Ima Robot. Full tracks. Tagged.

* Alice In Chains - Black Gives Way To Blue Seattle grunge pioneers return after 14 years, having survived the loss of their frontman, Layne Staley. Full tracks. Tagged.

* Hurricane Bells - Tonight Is The Ghost Not in Last.fm yet, hopefully will be soon. Solo album from Longwave frontman Steve Schiltz. Tagged in hope.

* Hyperstory - hyperstory debut album from L.A. musician Scott Blevins. "Varied sonic textures". Tagged.

* Fat Freddy's Drop - Dr. Boondigga and The Big BW NZ reggae. Platinum in four days with good reason. Not in Last.fm yet. Tagged in hope.
http://open.spotify.com/album/11z7rEPnN3kNGufn9I281r

* McAlmont & Nyman - The Glare unlikely collaboration that makes for intriguing listening. Not in Last.fm yet, and when it is, I'm not sure how they will present the artist names - Michael Nyman and David McAlmont. Link to Spotify:
http://open.spotify.com/album/4KVnVGolVPlWl7GML4JgjI

* Norah Jones - The Fall Delightful. Tagged in hope.

* Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures stoner rock from rock legends of today. Full tracks. Tagged.

* NED COLLETTE & WIREWALKER - Over the Stones, Under the Stars Australian singer-songwriter and friend. Don't know much about this yet. Full tracks. Tagged.

* The Echo Falls - The Echo Falls Debut album, folk-rock. Slighty old-fashioned, hippy, easy-listening, something to break up our 2009 radio. Full tracks. Tagged.

* Peter Broderick & Machinefabriek - Blank Grey Canvas Sky Folk and electronica collaboration. Tagged.

* Elizabeth Fraser - Moses single. Tribute song.

* Gomez- A New Tide released March 2009. Tagged.

*


* Spotify - albums not in Last.fm
* Spotify Collaborative Playlist Your selections and suggestions for 2009.

acreature said:
Hello!

After a couple of larger site releases we've got a quieter one for you today. Almost all of today's release was back-end/internal changes, but here's some details.


• XBox improvements. Last.fm will be coming to your XBox 360 so we've been making sure our systems can handle it and everything will work as it should. Even if you haven't got an XBox this results in a more reliable and slightly faster Last.fm experience for you.

• Web Service improvements. Our web services let people use Last.fm to make their own apps. We've got some new methods and additions to the old ones. You can read all the details in the Web Services forum now.

• Backend switches. There's a couple of internal services that have been retired in this release. You won't notice any difference, but one removes a single point of failure and another frees up our resources to focus on more exciting things.

• Support fixes. We fixed 17 bugs in this release, mostly with our internal & moderator tools. Better mod tools help keep Last.fm a friendly, spam-free place.

• Retirement of widgets & Facebook apps. Widgets and the Facebook apps have been around for a while now, but haven't been well-maintained recently as our focus shifted to building up the Last.fm API platform (and the 3rd party apps/widgets/tools it enables). As of today they won't be available any more. But don't despair! This lets us take care of our image charts, and there's a lot of third-party apps built using our API that are way cooler than our widgets ever were. Check out Build for some examples, and Facebook's application directory too.


That's it for now. We'll be back in 2 weeks with another update.


Source: Forums

Beautiful bizarre stop-motion claymation video for one of the best songs from Veckatimest.

Grizzly Bear - Ready, Able

By Martin Bryant on November 14, 2009

Scrub all memory of the dodgy YouTube/Last.fm mashup we covered last week because we’ve found another one and this is so, so much better.

TubeRadio.fm is a search engine for music videos on YouTube but with the ability to build and share video playlists of songs with others. The overall product comes across very much like ‘Spotify for music videos’.

The slick iTunes-esque interface allows you to search for music either via YouTube or via Last.fm’s database of releases. Then you can add individual tracks or whole albums to a playlist. As you play tracks, the video plays from YouTube alongside artist information from Last.fm with lyrics (where available) displayed from Lyricsfly.com.

TubeRadio.fm isn’t just for personal use though, it’s got the beginnings of a strong social side thanks to playlist sharing. You can share your music taste through Twitter, Facebook, by email or by a copying a direct URL. You can even befriend other users of the service and show off your finely crafted playlists to them directly on the site.

Everything about TubeRadio.fm screams quality – right down to small touches like the way a floating thumbnail for a video that appears when you hover over an item in your playlist.

It was developed by a London-based duo over four months and they are currently hard at work developing version 2 of the service. The revamp is due for launch next month but don’t wait for that – give it a go today.



Source: The Next Web

acreature said:
Hello!

We've got a slightly sneaky update for you this week – so sneaky we pushed it out on Monday. There's nothing on the website to show off, but we wanted to keep you up to date with what we've been working on:

• Last.fm is now on your XBox 360. Yesterday Microsoft and Last.fm launched the XBox 360 app we've been talking about. We put a lot of work into making sure this all went smoothly – speeding up web service calls, network maintenance, some last-minute bugfixes, and a sweet monitoring setup for the launch itself. You can find out more in our XBox section, and there's a group to talk to your fellow XBox users and get help with the app.

• Create your own Fantasy Festival with Sony. Since the last update Sony's Fantasy Festival has gone live. You've probably already seen this, as the link's in the header now, but if not you can create your own ideal festival lineup and compete with your friends over whose festival is best. You can also win some cool prizes.

• Bugfixes. We've had our hands full with the XBox launch so we only got seven bugs fixed in this release, but we've fixed the excessive tea pages, events losing their venues, a web services bug, and a couple of others.


That's it for now. See you here in 2 weeks!

Source: Forums

Friday 20 November 2009, by Richard Wray

Digital economy bill proposals receive welcome from music and film, but anger from ISPs and privacy campaigners

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/20/filesharing-crackdown

Downloads for Mac OS X and Windows
http://www.playdar.org/download/

November 23, 2009, by Daniel Terdiman

According to Microsoft spokesman David Dennis, the first-week figures show that at least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook, and that half a million Last.fm accounts were created in the first 24 hours of availability. Dennis didn't address how many Xbox Live users have used the service's Twitter feature, except to say that there have been "tweets from nearly every market where we have Xbox Live."

Full article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10403984-52.html

November 24th, 2009 | by Barb Dybwad

Now a new entrant will be breaking onto the scene at a $5 price point for all-you-can-stream playback and what looks to be a very nice interface for managing your music and playlists. The MOG Music Network has existed previously as an aggregated collection of MP3 blogs along with editorial curated content focused on identifying hot new trends in the music world. On December 2, they’ll be launching their ambitious new subscription service that hopes to find the sweet spot in the music subscription space.

Tracks will stream at a high-quality 256Kbps in the for now browser-based service, which has plans to launch a mobile music component by as early as the end of 2009. The MOG service will be neck and neck with Spotify (Spotify), another subscription-based music service that will offer some advertising supported and some paid levels of use when it crosses the Atlantic to launch in the U.S.

Full article: http://mashable.com/2009/11/24/mog-launches-dec-2/

by Daniel Farey-Jones, Brand Republic 19-Nov-09,

LONDON - The Sony Fantasy Festival competition, a promotion with Last.fm, has launched with more than 13,000 people having signed up to take part by the middle of its second day.

The competition gives people across 32 countries the chance to win weekly Sony prizes and an overall prize of a VIP experience to the Glastonbury festival for four people.

Full article: http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/968382/Sonys-fantasy-festival-hooks-13000-Lastfm-users-launch/

Written by Dana Oshiro / November 27, 2009

Developer Toby Padilla was one of the first to defend music content resolver Playdar when it was released to developers. Since then Padilla has contributed more than just his morale support. The former VP of Desktop and Client Software at Last.fm has since built Playgrub - a bookmarklet that scrapes supported sites for music metadata in order to create playlists.

Padilla's Playgrub is one of the missing pieces in the Playdar puzzle. In early November we wrote about Playdar - a project created by former Last.fm founder Richard Jones and XSPF music playlist format creator Lucas Gonze. Rather than automatically playing a music file via a streaming service, Playdar finds matching local files and plays those first. From there you can listen to music through Playdar-based players including Playlick and Spiffdar. The piece between finding the music and playing it, is Padilla's Playgrub. By installing the Playgrub bookmarking tool, users can create playlists from listed songs on Last.fm, Songkick, the iTunes charts, MusicBrainz and Grooveshark. While many would question the legality of Playgrub, the service does not scrape music from these sites, just the lists. From here Playdar detects any files that exist on your local hard drive and you're free to play the songs you own in the order listed on your favorite music site. While so many services concentrate on serving and selling new music to listeners, Playgrub is helping us set the tone with our own rediscovered tracks. To test Playgrub, install the bookmarklet and check playdar.com/download to install the universal content resolver.

See article for video and all links: http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/11/playgrub-music-playlists-for-t.php

http://playgrub.com/

By Lucian Parfeni, Web News Editor, 25th of November 2009

The deal was announced half a year ago, but things tend to move slower in the gaming world than in social media, so the Last.fm integration only came to fruition last week. And, the results are already beginning to show, the music streaming service managed to get almost one million new subscribers from the Xbox Live users which signed up for Last.fm. The CBS-owned company says that it was the biggest growth the site has seen since launch and that it broke the record for most users registered in a 24-hour period.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Last-fm-Gets-1-Million-New-Subscribers-in-One-Week-128039.shtml