echo chamber dept. : last.fm reactions

27.Iv.1430

In response to the announcement at http://blog.last.fm/2009/04/22/radio-subscriptions, user feedback is ferocious - largely to to a feeling of exclusion in the west (and russia and poland) - the "3rd world" is more used to the exclusion : http://blog.last.fm/2009/04/22/radio-subscriptions#comments.

Meanwhile untried alternatives from comments include: Deezer, FineTune or Finemusic, Spotify, blip.fm, www.aupeo.com, and maybe Jamendo. (sorry mebbe i'll add link later)

+ of course the other sites where content is entirely user generated - like Jamendo - though there are no familiar pop or jazz classics there.

More alts from comments,

"hey!
10 free alternatives to the Last.fm Radio service.
StumbleAudio
Spotify
SHOUTcast
Musicovery
Deezer
iLike
Tunerec
Songza
Live365
RadioBeta

Anyone knows another option?"

"-Spotify
-Grooveshark
-Finemusic
-Jamendo (about indie artists)excellent!
-musicax.org (listen & download songs)

I won’t pay, record label should pay, not me."

"Alternatives to last.fm are:
limited to FR, UK, scandinavia:
spotify
US only:
slacker, pandora
I don’t know:
seeqpod, blip.fm
There’s more on alternativeto.net

Do consider that none of them are last.fm, you’ll have to pay for the real thing."

One particular comment resonated:

"I’m just confused as to why my 30 song free trial includes a big google ad right next to it, when ad-supported radio is apparently not feasable in Canada."

I'm getting all the ads all the time too here in Africa , so what gives? Isn't the whole idea of ads to bombard the user with ads on every page? so what do users in the UK/US/Germany do different from users elsewhere - don't we all get the ads equally? And is it because the ad buyers come from those three countries? Well, heck, Google's got offices in my country too !



And I was just thinking how last.fm could be turning the tide of the ominous clearchannels radio tentaclurum.

I still think it is fully equiped to turn the tide of trend like clearchannel radio and it should be supported - even with subscriptions - but without the crass discrimination.

But the key is to make a fully licensed perpetually free alternative clone to last.fm .

The economics of which still elusive of course, until money is somehow plugged out of the equation altogether, and all labor efficiently allocated and renumerated. hoohoo.

It's tough because unlike wikipedia or facebook,
a) content isn't user generated
b) last.fm has to pay license fees to the record disables. wikipedia and the other other idiots on't have to pay licensing fees to anyone. We give them all under very permissive free licenses.

RIAA is again the clear enemy here.

But the truth lies deeper in the general american moral fabric and the judaic and protestant cupidity embedded in it, distinct and far more severely degraded from European ethics.

anyweg.

Some more excerpts from the comments:


" ... Paying for a radio service is the most ridiculous thing ever."

"So what you are actually saying is: We’d love our foreign listeners to pay for our largest group of listeners, so they can listen for free.

Well, thanks for that, we’ll move on to the next best thing and make that as big as last.fm now is :)"

" ``scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc will remain free in all countries”

thanks god biographies is still free… LOL"

"Well, it was fun while it lasted. Too bad I’ll need to use a proxy now to access last.fm now."

:)


"Do I charge for all the useful scrobble info I sent you? Do I charge for the artist descriptions I write? Do I charge for letting you stream my music? Just some random questions"

"Community site huh ? How a site like last.fm say that “i am a community site” ? Everyone have to pay exclude 3 “rich” country ?THE COMMUNITY MAKE LAST.FM , NOT LAST.FM ITSELF . NOT YOU “CBS” , YOU THINK YOU BOUGHT IT AND YOU CAN CHANGE IT TO WHAT YOU WANT ?"

"This is discrimination!!!"


"We’re managing a band, placed outside one of the “three lucky countries”. Since a new album is nearly ready, and in Lastfm we had a wide audience, we did decide to promote it there. But now… the audience will decrease drastically in most countries. So it is not a good idea to invest in promotion here anymore…

It’s a real shame, but I understand it’s a business, and they have to do whatever is better for them.

Good luck!"

"thank you guys, it was a good service… now i’ve to find something else…"


"I am gonna hear the last thirty tracks, jot down the titles of the cool songs and pieces I´ve discovered, as well as with the artists I didn´t know, find a way to keep in touch with the users I´ve made friends with, close my account and go to a peer to peer program to download all that music. SLSK anyone?

By the way,suggestions were made, Mark, but it seems that they didn´t matter. (check the other entries in the blog and their comments)

PS. Fuck last.fm"


"Just lost Launchcast a week ago in Canada. Now, on my birthday, I learn that I’ve lost Last.fm. Happy birthday to me. Sorry, guys, I haven’t been using Last.fm long enough to decide if it’s worth paying for, and I rather resent being forced to pay for something that is free in a few chosen countries."

"I repeat my idea: if users have to pay, ALL have to pay, not only ones that live outside USA and UK. I stop using it and, more important, I’ll stop scrobbling too! Your service LIVES with data scrobbled by users and I won’t give it for free.
Bye bye."

Too bad you already gave them your scrobbling data for free :) or :\

"+5000 подавитесь
eat you money, scumbags
Feel free to delete my account."

"Haha, i was playing Last.FM all day long, still ain’t noticing anything :)

If i keep it running without closing down, then i wont get cut of after 30+ songs? :D

It sucks that you can’t make a country specific ad campain, got to know a lots of new artists here.

The biggest bitches are the record labels, they just can’t get it, that there will be more downloading now, because ppl can’t listen via Last.FM anymore for free.

Just my 2 cents"

hehehe

"It’s fine that you start charging really, it’s just immensly retarted to know three countries don’t have to.

You can still get the radio’s from the API/site. So you can download the music elsewhere. (spotify and the like)

Three questions:
Does paying give you the extras old subscribers got (the playlists)?
Why not charge he UK/US/DE-trinity? If you need money you might as well. It doesn’t matter that you can advertise there, it would make it fair. (I would pay more for fair)
Why am I seeing ads?"

" ... It’s the whole “we all build this as a community, i alone (cbs) profit from it” attitude which i hate. ... To the last.fm core team, thanks guys you built something great, too bad the big boys ruined it. ..."

UPDATE 26.iv.2009:
So far slashdot and googlenews choose to ignore the issue - not very Internetizeny of them.


... Read more

note on gothic fiction

19.Iv.1430

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chinoiserie dept: reproducing form

08.iI.1430

I'm not much fond of sculpture but this wood sculpture is really, verily vow!


("Bodhisattva Guanyin; 11th/12th century A.D.; Polychromed Wood; Chinese; Shanxi Province; Liao Dynasty (907-1125)" , north song 960–1127 or jin dynasty )
src: click photograph

there are of course equivalent specimens in the history of european sculpture , even equally with wood which must demand more delicate subtleties, but the age range of the statue, and moreover the choice of this pose / posture , and for a buddha, make it particularly interesting.

... Read more

Vexillological deconstructionism dept.:

from arabo-american coincidences,

Cf. pan-arab colors


src: pan-arab colors, uae.

and the flag of the independent republic of rio grande (1840).


src: Image:Flag_of_the_Republic_of_Rio_Grande, public domain.

This flag also adds to the collection of the American/panamerican motif of stripes and its use throughout the offshoots of the Spanish empire; and particularly stripes with cantons or other divisions as shown in this flag. this collection is still unfinished.

This is not to imply the coincidence lies much deeper. For unlike their arab counterparts, the present-day occupants of the Rio Grande are far more likely to shoot in situations of misunderstanding "do not dial 911" first.

This kind of antagonism or misantrhopy perhaps borne of centuries of lawlessness and abuse (?) exists in arab society only , and not very informatively (as in not surprisingly,) in those arab (and other) areas occupied largely by Rio Grandian motivation.

The other antiparallelism b/w the two is that while this kind of pathology occurs in the occupied arab cases out of dispossession, it flourishes in the rio grandian ethos, even though they are the dispossessors (be they spanish with all sorts of habsbourg monarchs or anglosaxon)

Although the collection of American colonial striped flags is still in a process of selection and compilation, these arms of Charles I Habsburg of Spain (1516 - 1556; Charles V, HRE 1519) should provide enough appetizer as to the evolution of the striped motif in modern american colonies:

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space age is here

Space age is here when every few months we run into people putting appearances in helmets, but rather very cool helmets.



Of course tons of vectors lead up to it, from mountains of scifi, to the emerging universal bashfulness all of a sudden with everybody hooded in news footage, to the possibility those helmets comment on that. That bit particularly is doctrinal shit. It's a counter counter counter cou- hey that's my tail i been trying to catch .

Back to the helmets:

Nobody's helmets are cooler than Daft Punk's. If their music weren't cool they could probably eke a living just pimping those cool helmets. I'd seen their photos before, but early this year, I Ran into this photo when Facebook launched fan pages. Theirs was among the first. copyright copyright. yes the image is the copyright of "them" the owners of the copyright, which is linguistically redundant.



Not much later on, sprucing up the late summer news cycle, shenanigans of a certain Anonymous landed me on youtube watching one of his/their videos, from which was taken this snapshot with the helmet really stealing the show.




Speaking of which, is the whole Anonymous mystique is a sort of experiment in social dislocation by something like "RAND Corporation: The New Generation" ? nothing is impossible, :) particularly this sort of thing.



Later on the helmet got surreal beyond human comprehensibility.



Rather anticlimatically, finally my latest encounter was a couple of days ago when I saw the a thumbnail of the picture below at news.bbc pointing at some TV awards pics. The photo is of The Stig, a race driver & presenter of brit automoto TV program , Top Gear, getting an award. Ne'erheardo'im. But he's the Stig. new generation of racing,
helmet always on. day and night.



Meanwhile android designers have been taking to the human look of late,








I think such similitude is as ridiculous as the plaque sent with Pioneer craft in the 70s.




which brings us back to that the space age is here. ... Read more

life imitating art

I recall the real life images that seem to have provided the direct inspiration to some of herge's cases.

But here is an example of something that seems to take after his art,




The pictures show a research submarine drone and its designer. Details can be found here.

For images showing where some of Hergé's cases imitated life, we have,

"Hergé sous influence !"



and from the excellent site À la découverte de Tintin,

"Le case German Research in World War II"




A picture very similar to the Karaboudjan, here,

... Read more