Just a Musing

Lost In Thought

I was working on a homepage. A box with all available music streamers worldwide. During my research I came across a Wikipedia page with a list of terminated streamers. It made me lost in thought for a moment.

A long time ago. Long before Spotify and Deezer,  even YouTube was still a toddler, Google had no say in it yet. But I was on last.fm, Grooveshark and Myspace, the biggest social site in those days.

Myspace

I still don't understand how you can ruin the best and most expensive website in the world in such a short time, just by introducing beta versions of profile pages. Profile 2.0, the whole site crashed and froze. An hour on Myspace was good for viewing 2 pages and updating 1 widget on your profile. It was like Hell. It took so long to load. I stayed away from Myspace for a few months, only to return and find that it was still slow, but already somewhat better than before, probably because quite a few people had left and there was less movement on the site. I suspect so, I don't know for sure. But oh well... I was satisfied with the small improvements that were there. Until the day came that Myspace announced that they had a solution for the crashing problem: Profile 2.1! And again everything was ruined and I left again, only to hear in the media a little later that they were going to sell the whole thing. The most expensive website in the world was sold to 'Specific Media Group' and 'Justin Timberlake' for next to nothing. They transformed the entire website but for me it was game over, I didn't like it at all. And I still don't. I was on my profile on myspace a few weeks ago. I was curious, wondering if I could still log in. I hadn't been there in a few years. I got in but my profile was almost empty; my playlists are still there but apart from a forgotten song there is nothing in the lists anymore. Pictures? All gone. It's quiet... you can still hear some echoes in the distance but it's sad what happened to it. It felt like coming home to a robbed house.

Grooveshark

Well back to Grooveshark then. Grooveshark opined on a very dark level. How did they get their music? Through us, the users, we uploaded our CDs. And by some of the musicians themselves, of course. With 30 million active users, that's quite something. The first band that came to introduce themselves to me was 'Owl City', quite new at the time but still active now. Didn't they release a new album last year? Honestly, between you and me... I'm not really a fan, please keep that quiet, don't tell anyone, but when Owl City hits my eardrums again I think: 'yeah... Grooveshark'. So let's do that...

Anyway, you can imagine what the death blow was for Grooveshark. Lawsuit after lawsuit. But they were pioneers in what is very normal today. They also had a webplayer that you can compare with today's webplayers, a huge flashplayer. 

But don't worry about Grooveshark, it's a shark and because... Grooveshark - Listen to music for free 

web archive

Last.fm

Last.fm was legal in that regard. I paid 3 euros per month and I could stream. For that you had to download software to your PC with which you could scrobble and stream at the same time. But not with the free choice like today: You could indicate a tag or an artist name and then press play. You didn't know which songs would come and when a song was over you couldn't just listen to it again. No, wait and hope that it would come along again soon. Real radio. I got to know a lot of new bands and artists back then. We still do scrobbling today but streaming is a thing of the past. Although you can still listen to music via Youtube or Spotify. One of my activities there today: adding missing videos. There is also still a huge database of biographies. Biographies that are spread all over the internet we bring together in 1 place: Last.fm. I also still do that but not as much as before.

Last.fm is an expert in giving recommendations based on statistics (scrobbles). Later players like WE7, Deezer and Spotify learned that technique from Last.fm. So... Next time you're on Spotify and you see your recommendations, know that Last.fm is at the source. For those various reasons Last.fm still deserves respect even though there is a lot of faded glory at Last.fm. It wasn't just music... no it was also a social site with countless communities where you made friends like on Facebook. A profile page with a sidebar where we placed all kinds of fun and/or personal gadgets with BBcode. It was endless. We filled that entire sidebar with tag clouds, top scrobbles, photos, performances and festivals we went to,... you name it, say something, it was all possible. That's over. Too bad...

8 Tracks

There is one more that worries me: 8 tracks seems to be dying. Waiting for someone to pull the plug. 

Simplification

I call it the simplification of the internet. Websites had to become lighter, better and faster loading, The heavy FLV player disappeared and the lightweight HTML5 player appeared. Understandable of course because the internet is also growing. More and more users who all want to surf at the speed of light. I get it. But I still like to point the finger at those little creatures from hell called smartphones. They couldn't handle it. We had to simplify websites to make them work on phones and tablets. I have them too, but I also have a desktop. The small technologies are handy, but I can't do my thing on a phone. To give you an idea: right now I have 2 browsers open, together good for 19 tabs + extensions, Mediaplayer + scrobbler on desktop, a few folders and my notepad. See? That can't be done on a phone. And I feel it... You wonder why I would have 19 tabs open. Well... I have this problem... I have no plan... I start a task with full intention, but along the way I get distracted by something else and in this distraction I find another distraction and in that distraction... Should I continue? Keep in mind that this is not my profession. This website, youtube, Last.fm, is free time. So I don't have to finish anything. I'm allowed to digress.

Myspace, where you could pimp your entire page... gone. The styling of Youtube and last.fm... gone. So I'm tinkering a bit with this website just because it's fun. Nothing is a must. Experimenting.

Ok, this website is still new but it's not my first either. Also tried a bit of Blogger and Wordpress. Am I good at it? Not really. A while back I started using a new theme on Blogger. After about 10 years of messing around it was broken. But I did enjoy it. Putting on a new theme like that is just starting over. I don't mind that. I hope it happens again someday. 

This was just a musing...