Last.fm, I worry about you

You used to be the cool kid, the place to go for streaming music. Now several other services from around the world are eating your shorts, and you don’t even seem to care, especially when it comes to the last.fm web experience:

• According to your FAQs you can’t change your username, nor can you have your stats moved from one account to another. This is actually a big deal for a service that’s all about collecting information about your taste in music. So if you were an early adopter, but you happened to sign up with a username you’ve now grown tired of, you have only two options: stick with the stupid name or lose all your data.
• The whole social media aspect of the site is way underdeveloped. I am sure it all seemed very cutting edge back in 2002. Not anymore.
• Ads, ads, ads. Not only on the site itself, but in between every couple songs when streaming from the website. You’re basically pushing people to become subscribers, which is okay. We get it, hardly anything is free these days, and things on the web are no exception. But if you want more people to pay, you’re going to have to provide them with even better features. As of now, you’re giving them customisable radio stations with an undercooked social experience. Services like Spotify and MOG offer much more for a comparable price, and you can count yourselves lucky that they’re not (yet) available everywhere.
• If you ever had to manage an artist’s profile on last.fm, you know how crappy the whole “Music Manager” system is. It’s aesthetically unpleasant, unnecessarily complicated and not even that functional. The ability to import RSS feeds from other websites or blogs, though still being advertised (“why not add an RSS feed?”) has been offline for what has to be over half a year now. The user forums don’t really point to anything being done to fix that.
• Lack of communication: if you are part of a community, you want to know what the developers are working on to improve the experience. If you take a look at the weblog you can clearly see that these are all very clever and creative people who are passionate about their product. But aside from a shiny new iPhone app, there’s nothing there about the future of last.fm, and considering the stiff competition that might turn out to be a rather careless move.