MIR Research at Last.fm

I’ve joined Last.fm’s last week. Last.fm has over 20 million users and is all about music: listening to music, discovering music, keeping track of your own listening history, showing other people what you listen to, finding other people who listen to similar music, finding out and exploring what friends are listening to, keeping track of events related to music (such as concerts), helping artists find and get in touch with their audience, watching music videos, and more. Last.fm’s team is continuously working on making it easier and more fun to enjoy and discover music. Not even a power outage can stop us ;-)

From an MIR researcher’s perspective there are two particularly notable things about Last.fm. First of all, we got the best user community which provides valuable feedback helping develop new services and improve existing ones. Evaluating MIR technologies has never been easier. Second, we’re constantly receiving information about which tracks are playable in which context, and which words (tags) can be associated with which music. It’s a wonderful playground to explore interesting MIR related questions.