|
absolutely...
I've never spent any time on Last.fm, but my understanding of it is pretty similar to how I was going to do the site.
The germ of the idea was to have members list & rank what they like & also discuss music in a forum & generate personalized radio.
Back then, I was just beginning to stock a Winamp player with .mp3s & mused upon how much easier it was & enjoyable it was to listen to music with the player on random than having to decide all the time what to listen to instead of choosing what I wanted to hear. After a time, I began to get bored with my selections too & at that point started making data discs that I could load in for different moods or genres, or artists. I would load the disc I wanted with the data & then just drag it all into Winamp. Once a couple of thousand songs at least were in there, one could just sit back & let it play random. The one major flaw in all this was that Winamp was not truly random & that all the music being played was being sourced by me with no outside input from those with similar interests. the idea grew from there. I knew it wasn't just me, because I talked to other people that also preferred a random mode a lot of the time with their music players. Besides, who hasn't sat around with their girlfriend & experienced the ennui of a back & forth of, "Where do you want to go?", "what do you want to do?" or "Where should we go eat?" hehe...I also knew that for the site to be successfully branded that some intensive organic placement must be paid for in time spent to get those links humming & that perhaps, most important of all, I knew that the site had to run on a slick up-to-date platform & that it might even require me hiring some graphic designers, although I felt that ultimately, I could at least choose the colors & fonts myself with my sensibilities, but I had no expertise in setting up any of the newer types of platforms & I had already invested in my own site already. I had just made it for relatively cheap & I still use it to this day & it's on an old miva merchant platform & that's about the extent of my knowledge, & my budget. So, you see, potentially, all the elements were there to make a site very much like Last.fm & this is a record of my sour grapes.
|