Felix Miller

CEO, Last.fm

The Musical Myware
13 minutes, 6.4mb, recorded 2006-03-07
Felix Miller

Felix Miller, co-founder of the free on line music service Last.fm, explains how social networking can lead to a more enhanced listener experience for music lovers everywhere. Mr. Miller clearly illustrates the concepts and principles underlying the art of attention data mining utilized by Last.fm to harness the knowledge of the crowd and create a rich music distribution platform.

In his brief and concise presentation, Mr. Miller invites users to spy on themselves by installing software called Audioscrobbler onto their computers, enabling Last.fm to record their music selections and listening habits. He describes this process as MyWare and makes an effort to distinguish it from Spy Ware, which records users activities without their knowledge or consent. This voluntary cooperation of its members enables Last.fm to create a huge song database and to make recommendations based on tagging and listening patterns. He makes the case that everybody out there already knows what you need to know, and that a culture of sharing is beneficial for everyone.

Felix and Last.fm are offering to learn your likes and dislikes, create recommendations, and supply you with a steady stream of 128k quality mp3 audio that you are almost guaranteed to love. You can create your own radio station and use, edit, or delete an XML file of your data. Last.fm promises to put the listener in charge in what Felix enthusiastically describes as a social music revolution.


Felix Miller is co-founder and CEO of Last.fm. Felix has a background in thinking about and building on line music platforms. With fellow Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel he founded insine.net, a netlabel for unsigned electronic artists, in 2000. This led to the inception of Last.fm in 2002 and the firm belief that no one should ever have to listen to the wrong music again and that all artists should have the same chance to be heard. In 2003 Last.fm joined forces with Richard Jones and his Audioscrobbler completing the current management team.

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This free podcast is from our Emerging Technology Conference series.

For The Conversations Network:

  • Post-production audio engineer: Bruce Sharpe
  • Website editor: Al Arthur
  • Series producer: Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Photo: James Duncan Davidson/O