Jeez, you’ve got to sit through a pre-roll advert before listening to a “radio” station on last.fm nowadays. I only noticed because I couldn’t get any radio stations to start playing, so disabled Adblock in my Firefox.
Refreshing the page launched the player straight away, but with a 30-second video advert for some crappy horror film before any songs were played. I’m half-expecting more adverts after a couple of tracks…
Maybe I need to renew my last.fm subscription. It was only £3 a month or so, pretty good value.
Actually, whilst I’m talking about the last.fm radio player, it’s worth noting how much it has changed over the last year or so. It used to be very small, borderline minimalistic, with not much more than the track details, volume controls, and options to “love”/”ban” the track, as well as being able to skip to the next song.
It was also a pop-up, in its own little window, perfectly sized and with nothing else other than the Flash player.
Sometime recently, the player became much bigger, and you now can’t pop it out into a new mini-window. With some automagic, the rest of the page updates to include more details of the artist you’re listening to, which can be handy when you’re discovering new music.
But with the increased size came the use of slideshows. These are constantly moving/changing images from the user-uploads for the artist in question, and as the artist changes so do the images. For me, this is pointless, because I open last.fm in one tab, start playing some music and then have it on in the background. I don’t see any of the images, so I’ve turned off the slideshow and just get one static image instead.
What I didn’t realise until just now is that the larger player and the capability to having moving images means that it is the perfect display device to show video adverts. Highly intrusive, unskippable, unmutable adverts. Sigh.
I guess this is what happens when a huge media conglomerate (CBS) takes over something that was previously fun and useful…
