A year or two (has it been that long?) ago, I wrote a website called Listen-To. The site, along with a media player plugin, would keep track of what music you listened to, and compiled some statistics for you. You could find out what artist/album/song you listened to the most, etc. It provided an image for your blog, livejournal, myspace, forums, AIM sub-profile, etc. that would show what you were listening to at that instant. Once it got going, within a few months there were over 20,000 users with little-to-no advertising on my part. It eventually outgrew its design, and the free time I had to give wasn’t nearly enough to support it .. so I took it down for a redesign to hopefully relieve some of the support necessary to keep it running.
Almost a year later, I really haven’t worked on it much. Life has taken over; it sucks, but I’m happy with my life right now, so not having Listen-To is not too big for me. I had fun, I learned a lot, and am pretty proud of what Listen-To was. Will Listen-To be back? Nah, probably not. Unless they find a way to pack 3-4 more hours into a day.
Anyway — there was another site, based out of England, that did the same basic thing as Listen-To, called Audioscrobbler. They just merged with their sister site (last.fm) yesterday. Both sites had been loosely intertwined; sharing user accounts, data, etc. The new design eliminates the Audioscrobbler interface, and puts everything on the last.fm site.
If you liked Listen-To, go check out last.fm. They’ve done a great job on the design and it seems to be working pretty good so far.
August 10th, 2005 at 8:32 am
Do you know any of the background between these two sites? It seems that the only difference at one time was the radio and a couple of the search funtions. But when the released the new version on Last over a month ago, it seemed to be a much more desireable site.
August 10th, 2005 at 8:49 am
They’re both developed by the same set of people. They had two different intentions, I believe, but they would work together well too .. so they merged them together, it looks like.
August 11th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
Yea for quite some time Last.fm shared the Audioscrobbler’s database, so the charts were pretty much the same. I signed up over at Audioscrobbler a few months back, but a week or so afterwards, I was informed of Last.fm and ever since then, I’ve only visisted Last.fm. Imo, it has a much better layout and the Radio was quite good.
August 11th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
Wow! I didn’t know you were the man behind Listen-to! A lot of my friends from a message board I go to miss it, and still think it’s superior to Last.FM. You should really consider starting it up again as you’d have a pretty large fanbase.