Today Last.fm decided to take wraps off its new design they’ve been working on since May. I was not a part of the beta but still at first glance the new design looks little different from the one we saw during the beta period. Looking through the Last.fm forums I found that the beta design was much criticized and the design that we see now is after tons of user feedback.

I was a Last.fm user for quite some time before I stopped using it for unknown reasons. In the past Last.fm always had a confusing navigational structure that for some reason never got you to what you wanted. Looks like Last.fm team has worked hard to resolve the navigational issues that plagued the old design and the new design is marked improvement over the older one.

Take a look at the screenshots yourself and you will see why the new design is much cleaner and more functional than the old design..

The New Design

The Beta Design

The Old Design

Surely the new design is more clean and functional than the original Last.fm. But so far the new design has evoked nothing but reactions favoring the extreme negative.

Some users have gone to the lengths of calling the new design as Myspace clones and they have expressed their dissatisfaction over it. Here are few opinions about the new design…

MidwinterSun said,

the main problem here is that the new site is just a mess. The old last.fm had identity. It was different. And what do we got now? A parody of web 2.0!

Last.fm used to be about the music we listen. So when I visit someone’s profile, I see what their tastes in music are. This was the reason I liked last.fm – the musical revolution, right?

It was different. Now it’s like every other site on the web.

Ant17 said,

This, however, sucks. I can’t believe one of my favourite and most used sites is about to go straight to the trash bin. If you want to make a site look like a new vulgar, post-modern tacky iPod which is completely user-unfriendly, then there are plenty of pointless social gathering sites to visit.

There is absolutely no need to destroy one of the best working and most appealing sites that’s been praised for years, without any option of a decline. Quite simply, horrible service and a now horrible site.

A lot of people have asked Last.fm an option to switch back to the old design.. If you don’t like the new design voice your opinion in this forum thread, hopefully Last.fm will listen to its audience.

Also give a try to this Userstyle that gives Last.fm some new features while preserving the identity of the old design.

And to conclude, I actually like the new design, but I feel that Last.fm has lost much of its identity its built up over the years with this design. Maybe an extended beta would have been a better option..

What is your opinion about the new design? Which one do you like?

Screenshots Credits – ReadWriteWeb

Listening to Music is also very easy. All you need to do is just select the genre of music you want to listen to and Musicovery starts dishing out the music of your choice. Added bonus is that you get a Tree kind of view that shows songs which are similar to the one your listening to now. This is the easiest way to find the unheard track that you are soon going to fall in love with.

What you need to make this tutorial work for you :

Last.fm consists of a shoutcast mp3 stream, and some webservices. To play a stream, you will need at least:

• A shoutcast-stream receiver, like, for example, Winamp (or any media player, basically)
• At least 128k internet connection
• A means to use the http protocol (like, a browser)
• A means to compute MD5 sums

Play last.fm streams without the player

Via Pingpulse