Spotify is trying to be the perfect on demand music service, Last.fm isn't. It's something we tried and ended up moving away from a year or two back.
On demand music is a very difficult market to be in. There are lots of companies trying but many failing or hitting difficulties, like Spotify in the US. There are real challenges in a) being profitable and b) stay on the good side of labels.
Personally I believe that the on-demand part of music streaming is commodity and more can be easily replaced, where as scrobbling provides a richer and more personal experience. However, I do agree with parts of the article, Last.fm hasn't moved as fast as it could have, some features need adding and some improving. That's part of the plan for this year.
There are so many features, integrations, interesting things, etc. that you could do with your platform, userbase, and data, it just seems like after the acquisition, all future dev. halted. It is a shame, and I'm now looking for an alternative after years of scrobbling, and being an avid user. Lately I've been using http://hypem.com -- it would be fantastic if they could mine my own personal scrobble data and make recommendations based on it.
I can entirely understand that, and kind of agree. We have more data that anyone could know what to do with, but we should be doing more, I'd certainly like us to be.
To try and explain the apparent lack of activity; the last couple of years have had a lot of sorting-house, changes in product (moving away from on-demand, charging for some services, etc) and some technical "house keeping". Last.fm has been around for ~8 years, that is a long time and comes with a lot of technical debt, it can slow you down.
PS: One of my favourite things about Last.fm is our approach to openness of data, our API makes it totally possible for hypem (who are awesome, especially Anthony) to use your scrobbling data, even the recommendations we generate for you, on hypem.
We believe that if the data is visible on the website then there should probably be an API for it, because if there isn't, then someone will have to scrape it anyway.
There isn't a Facebook style "Give me a chuffing great zip" option, but there are lots of API wrappers to pull down your scrobble history (for example). It could be friendlier to non technical users, but it's entirely possible.
Counter data-point here: I just let my last.fm subscription lapse and switched to rdio because of on demand music even though its "related music" throws up a lot more crap than last.fm does.
Spotify is trying to be the perfect on demand music service, Last.fm isn't. It's something we tried and ended up moving away from a year or two back.
On demand music is a very difficult market to be in. There are lots of companies trying but many failing or hitting difficulties, like Spotify in the US. There are real challenges in a) being profitable and b) stay on the good side of labels.
Personally I believe that the on-demand part of music streaming is commodity and more can be easily replaced, where as scrobbling provides a richer and more personal experience. However, I do agree with parts of the article, Last.fm hasn't moved as fast as it could have, some features need adding and some improving. That's part of the plan for this year.