Why Last.FM started to annoy me…
Posted June 18, 2009 – 9:05 pm in: Interaction Design
Last.FM introduced two new features which make you want to listen to something else.
The first one is ‘Are you still listening?’- For a non registered user, not interacting with Last.FM interface for 45 minutes will pause the music and display the ‘Inactivity bear’ icon prompting you to click ‘resume’ if you want to continue listening. The Last.FM forum is already full of people complaining about this nonsense. Many people use their computer as a media center and do not interact with the keyboard at all while listening. The reason behind this is that Last.FM pays for every song played on the user’s computer so the bear doesn’t really care about whether the music is falling on deaf ears as he says, he is just worried about his money. The other feature is an advertisement which shows before the radio starts playing your station. The advertisement playing these days has a very loud hard rock guitar and the volume control has been deliberately disabled which is outrageous! Last.FM used to be a great service but with these new tactics I am not sure how much longer users will bear it.
