Discussion Thread

Hi all,

I joined Last.fm a couple of months ago and discovered that MP3s uploaded to the site and tagged "free download" are stripped of critical ID3 tag frames, including the all-important TCOP (Copyright text), WCOP (URL to Copyright/Legal information) and WOAF (URL to official audio file download page).  I wrote a note to their support forums on November 23rd, describing the situation, and received an unsympathetic reply, including "I struggle to imagine many people caring."

For a deeper, technical explanation of those MP3 ID3 tag frames, Creative Commons licensing schemes and how Google may use those critical tags to index your free MP3s, please check out my original note.

After three months, there's been no reply and no change.  So, think twice before offering free MP3 downloads on Last.fm.  Furthermore, I encourage artists to contact the company and request that they remedy this situation right away.  It's fundamentally wrong to strip copyright information from an artist's work before redistributing it.

I hope this is helpful.

Dave

Thanks for sharing this. Keep us up to date if you get a response, or find out more.

Generally, I like Last.FM, because it lets me know who is playing my band's music, and when. I've really liked using it as an artist. But, of course, they shouldn't strip out copyright info.

Hi all,

There is one more thing to beware of with "setting your MP3s free" for download on last.fm. Based on my observations, an MP3 uploaded to last.fm is  "processed," which means that it is decoded to full-quality WAV and then re-encoded to 128kbps. What this means to you is that the tracks that you worked on for several hours to ensure that they sound great are taken down a quality notch for your last.fm listeners and downloaders. And as Rigel7 noticed, many important details within your ID3 tags are lost - even that nice album cover art you spent several hours creating. That all said, I am sure they are just trying to normalize the ID3 tags on their system, and probably  the audio levels as well, for consistency's sake. In the end, though, it means last.fm will deliver to your listeners an inferior version of your product.

If you really want your music to sound as best as it can on last.fm, do what I had to do years ago with MySpace - upload a constant bitrate 320kbps MP3 (the best MP3 quality possible) so that when it's re-encoded to 128k, it is losing as little as is possible with such a process.

Many thanks to Rigel7 for alerting us to this situation which prompted me to go and check the sound quality of what was being delivered.

If anyone hears that last.fm changes their process, let us all know!

-Tom