There is some exciting news from Last.fm. I have been in love with that website ever since I signed up back in 2004, and there is now yet another reason to love it.

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Beforehand, you could only play a select few tracks in full for free — and to be honest, they were mostly rubbish. Now all four major labels as well as 150,000 indies are on board letting people listen to their music for free on Last.fm. Millions of songs are now at my fingertips.

Okay, so the music is not completely free. Once you’ve listened to a track three times, you will be blocked from listening to it again until you pay up. But complaining about this would be churlish. Even if you approach it as a kind of ‘try before you buy’ service, this is much, much better than anything that has come before.

For me, this is the day the recorded music industry has begun to face the music (excuse the pun). There have been signs of them facing up to the reality of a world with the internet. But even, for instance, their plans to sell DRM-free MP3s through Amazon was as much an attempt to derail Apple’s dominance in the digital download arena as anything else.

No doubt there will be questions about the financial viability of this. The BBC report on the announcement certainly adopts a slightly sniffy, sceptical tone.

It certainly feels strange, coming just a couple of weeks after Pandora closed its similar service in the UK on the basis that the labels were making it too difficult.

Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate…

But that is pretty much the model that Last.fm is adopting:

We’re not printing money to pay for this—but the business model is simple enough: we are paying artists and labels a share of advertising revenue from the website.

Today we’re redesigning the music economy.

How can Last.fm make it work if Pandora couldn’t? It is true that Last.fm has big backing in the form of its owner, CBS. But if it’s not financially viable, it’s not financially viable, right?

Maybe there is more to this, or there is something I’m missing. Leaving the Pandora issue aside, it looks as though something big has happened today — as though someone’s banged a gong and the majors have all woken up to what’s going on. And they’ve agreed to finally do something sensible about the situation. Today music became even cheaper, and we all became a bit richer.

Record labels and video distributors had been ticked off by consumers for charging high prices for quite a while. At first the labels got away with it though. This was because they actually added value to the product. They were the only ones who were able to actually deliver the product to consumers efficiently.

However, with the advent of the internet and explosion of file-sharing, they are no longer the only people who can deliver content. It’s even worse than that. They are now woefully inefficient at delivering content.

The big question staring the record companies in the face has been: why should people pay £10 or £20 to buy a CD or a DVD when they could download it for free? Their original answer to this question has been to criminalise the very fans whose custom they depend upon. At every turn, consumers of music are accused of stealing music and killing the record industry.

Not exactly the best way to build a loyal fanbase.

Since that approach didn’t work, the record labels reluctantly dipped their toe into the digital water. But even this was a complete disaster. They insisted on releasing music that was crippled by DRM. This shackled the music, yet again making the consumer feel like a criminal.

The worst instances of DRM prevent people from listening to music on different devices. A high-profile example is music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, which can’t be played on any device unless it was made by Apple. That is like buying a CD released by Sony BMG and only being allowed to play it on CD players manufactured by Sony. It is outrageous, and it is a wonder that the music industry ever felt that it was a sensible approach. Sadly, the most blinkered companies still release digital music in this way.

Incidentally, kudos should go to Warp Records, who recognised from the very start that its fans wouldn’t like to be treated as criminals. Its foray into the digital download world, Bleep, sells music at the highest quality the MP3 format can provide and entirely without DRM.

Some albums are even available as lossless (i.e. CD-quality) FLAC files. And you are allowed to preview the entire track before purchasing. Some albums also come with exclusive artwork, screensavers and so on. Furthermore, a (comparatively) huge cut of the profits goes to the artists, which is where fans like to see profits go.

Now hundreds of independent labels sell their music on the service. Bleep has been a huge success, having sold over a million downloads. The majors should have realised that this is how it should have been done from the start.

The problem facing the record industry remains. Their expertise was in distribution, but this advantage was removed by the internet. Their solutions don’t address the fundamental problem. Why should someone buy a digital download when they can get it for free from peer-to-peer networks?

The worst solutions were never going to work because they made the consumer feel like criminals. The better solutions — like Bleep — work to an extent because they tickle the fan’s tummy, making him feel good.

Regardless of what the record companies would like to think, the internet has greatly improved efficiency and has made consumers better off. Unless they really like pretty boxes, a choice between buying a CD for upwards of £10 or downloading the music for free is a no-brainer.

Sticking plaster solutions such as reducing the price of CDs or releasing DRM-infected MP3s were never going to do. And you can’t un-invent the internet. In their current state, record companies are a complete anachronism. An entirely new business model is needed in order for them to survive. It is the only way. For some of them, it may already be too late.

But I think there is an answer. And I think they are catching on to it. But I’ll write about that in my next post.

If you are a user of Windows Vista, you will no doubt be aware of Windows Gadgets. For the uninitiated, they are basically tiny little applications that run on your desktop (you might also know them as widgets or, in the world of Facebook, applications). You will also be aware that none of the sidebar gadgets in existence are actually useful.

Yeah, there’s that massive oversized analogue clock. And there’s that calendar that doesn’t do anything except tell you what the date is. Then there is the RSS reader that only allows you to subscribe to certain Microsoft feeds. The only really useful one that came as a default on Vista is the post-it note style thing. But apart from that, unless you really like currency converters, there was not much to get stuck into.

There isn’t even anything decent among the third-party efforts. The only good one is iTunes Accessory. Almost all of the others are banal and pointless.

This always struck me as a bit weird. After all, there seem to be a lot of good widgets available for Mac OS X. And even when you look at the wonderful and varied ways that Facebook Applications have been used, the world of Windows Sidebar Gadgets is startlingly stagnant.

But yesterday I discovered a truly useful and surprisingly well-executed Gadget made by National Rail Enquiries. Once you install the gadget, you simply type in your start station (and, optionally, your destination station) and up pops a list of how the trains are running. Essentially, it is the live departure boards feature of the National Rail website, just sitting there in the corner ready for me to glance at.

I already put it to good use yesterday, in my little game of chicken (what’s the latest train I dare to get?). I couldn’t decide which between two trains I should get. But when the earlier one started to run late, I decided I had better stay on the safe side and get the earlier one.

The gadget could do with a couple of extra features. Clicking on a journey brings up a larger screen with details on the expected journey times — but only from your station onwards (eg., I get a table of all the stations between Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh Waverley). But I usually like to see how the train has been running at stations prior to Kirkcaldy to give me a better idea of the journey’s history. I always get the impression that the journey estimates are a little on the optimistic side, and I’d rather like to see the cold, hard facts of how the train has actually been getting along.

But I can’t complain too much. As I said, it is just amazing enough that such a useful gadget has finally been made, and by National Rail Enquiries of all people! I get the feeling that it is going unnoticed (apparently it’s been around since July, and I’ve only just found out about it). If you are a regular train user and have Windows Vista, you probably ought to install it.

I am a big fan of the music discovery and social networking site Last.fm. I am also a lover of beautiful pointless graphs. So LastGraph was always going to be a winner for me.

The existence of LastGraph makes me so happy. Like Andrew Godwin, who wrote LastGraph, I read this webpage a while ago and thought to myself, “I want.” But I thought it was a bit of a long shot to expect anyone to provide such a service.

Obviously I was wrong! What’s more, there are plenty of different options to choose from, so once you’ve made one graph you can make another and look at it differently.

Unfortunately, it only goes back as far as the beginning of 2005, so the early part of my Last.fm history. But what remains is fascinating to look at. The snapshot I have posted above is from May–July 2007. For some reason I always get more nostalgic about music that I listened to during summer, so I’m pretty sure that looking back I will get a little bit misty-eyed about Justice, Simian Mobile Disco and Can (incidentally, they were all albums that I bought on my last trip to the pre-HMV Fopp).

If, for some reason, you are interested in seeing the entire graph, it is available to download here. But be warned — the PDF is quite a large file!

The colours represent how early I first listened to a band. Reds and oranges were the first bands I listened to; purples are the most recent and greens are in the middle. Glancing at my graph, it is clear how much more eclectic my listening habits are. As time goes on there are fewer large patches, and the reds have been squeezed out by a larger variety of colours.

Surprisingly, it is completely impossible to follow any band all the way through my graph. I think this is down to the fact that I tend to just put iTunes in shuffle mode and let it select albums itself. I suspect the same bands would crop up week after week if I tended to choose for myself.

Even so, I am amazed that I can only pick out Battles three times on my graph. I have been flat-out obsessed with them for over a year (and particularly since the release of Mirrored), but seemingly I have not listened to them as much as I had thought.

My theory is that when I am out and about (and therefore not scrobbling), I choose what album to listen to more often, so this is where I have listened to Battles the most. (I think this happened to Polar Bear as well, who I listened to a lot, but are nowhere to be seen on my Last.fm profile.)

Funnily, I can see plenty of patches where I listened to Eels a lot. I never understood why Eels appear so high up on my Last.fm profile (not just overall, but for the past 12 months as well). I’m not sure the graph has aided my understanding of this, but I have clearly listened to Eels a lot more often than I thought.

I just got an iPod, so I will be able to scrobble while I’m out and about as well. I predict an increase in both the amount of music and large patches appearing on the graph. I hope LastGraph sticks around because it will be really interesting to create more of these graphs to compare over time.

H/T lots of people including Plasticbag and Somefool.

Firstly, I need to apologise for the lateness of this post. I have been putting it off for a long time now (over a week actually!).

I have written before about how I have not been able to get into podcasting. But I was asked personally on Twitter to write about this, so I thought I’d better!

It is strange how podcasting has never captured my interest. When I was a child you would have said I would be more likely to become a podcaster than a blogger. I never had much interest in writing or even reading. And while everyone else was off playing doctors & nurses and cowboys & Indians, I was indoors pretending to be a radio presenter. Sad, I know!

Anyway, here is the post with the challenge to F1 bloggers:

I read with interest what you might describe as a call to arms on Renault’s blog today, because it touches on a subject I’ve been giving some thought to recently. Namely that Formula 1 bloggers spend a lot of time picking up the latest news from traditional media sources and posting their thoughts, yet spend almost zero time listening to podcasts and doing the same.

The post goes on to outline some of the reasons this might be the case. They are similar reasons as why I have not got into podcasting. The main one is that it is quite time-consuming to listen to podcasts.

With blogging, I can be subscribed to about 200 blogs and get through the day’s posts from those blogs fairly easily (if I have, say, a couple of hours to spend in the evening). This is because I can just scan through all the posts and read whatever grabs my attention. While I might miss the odd gem by doing this, I also save a lot of time just by skipping past boring posts.

With a podcast, you just cannot do this. Sure, there is a fast-forward button in iTunes. But I can’t ’skim-listen’ to a podcast in the same way that I can skim-read a blog post. So I just have to sit through all the boring bits in the hope that there will be something interesting sooner or later.

Not that there is much chance of me being bored with the good F1 podcasts out there (thank goodness ITV don’t make a podcast, eh?!). But the point still stands: listening to podcasts is time consuming.

A few days ago I listened to the latest Renault F1 podcast and Sidepodcast. Listening to those two took an hour. And while, for the most part, this was an entertaining and informative hour, the whole thing does depend on me having a spare hour to spend in the first place.

I have tried to listen to podcasts more in the past, and the experiment usually does not last long. Last week I did cite the BBC’s rather excellent Chequered Flag podcast. I have downloaded it and listened from time to time, but the only reason I picked up on Anthony Davidson’s comments last week was because it happened to be on the radio overnight when I was listening.

As for the Renault F1 podcast, I was quite impressed. The discussion section with Pat Symonds and Alan Permane were particularly good. As for there being not “too much spin”, I am not so sure. It is true that nobody tried to kid us on that Renault have had a perfect season so far. But they know that to claim otherwise would just make them look a bit silly, Iraqi information minister style.

I like Pat Symonds a lot actually because he does not hide away from the truth. In the podcast he admits that Heikki Kovalainen has not done as well as they might have hoped. But they could hardly claim that Kovalainen has blown the field away, because every F1 fan with two brain cells would know that it would be a lie.

But back to the puzzle posed by Sidepodcast.

…Formula 1 bloggers spend a lot of time picking up the latest news from traditional media sources and posting their thoughts, yet spend almost zero time listening to podcasts and doing the same.

I’m not exactly sure what the point is here. I mean, where do podcasters get their news from if it isn’t from traditional media sources (”official” podcasts like Renault’s aside). Podcasters and bloggers alike rely on traditional media sources to keep up on the news, so I don’t really understand what the point is of complaining when bloggers do it.

But here is another conundrum. I am discovering new F1 blogs all the time, but where exactly are all the F1 podcasts? No doubt a quick search on iTunes will unearth some. But as I said, it is time-consuming to even discover whether a podcast is worth listening to or not.

With a blog I can take a quick look at it, skim through a couple of posts and decide if it is worth subscribing to or not. I simply can’t do this with a podcast. I have to listen to the whole thing before passing judgement. And if listening to two podcasts takes an hour, how long will experimentally listening to newly-discovered podcasts take?

Besides Renault and Sidepodcast, I have only ever listened to one F1 podcast and I found it quite unfulfilling. It was literally just two blokes sitting there talking, and one of them didn’t seem to have much of a clue. Or at least he was caught off guard by a couple of the topics, which made me think that a little more preparation wouldn’t have gone amiss. (Sidepodcast is much more slick and entertaining, so I will probably stick with it.)

I am on my summer break at the moment, so I have some more spare time on my hands. I have also subscribed to the Williams podcast in iTunes. But what are the F1 podcasts I should have a listen to?

(Incidentally, what on earth is going on with that Williams website? Those bouncing circles are infuriating!)