The Origins of Last.fm and Audioscrobbler: How 2002 Student Projects Pioneered Social Music Discovery

Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.

What we now know as the 'social web' — or Web 2.0 — didn't arrive until around 2004. But the first inklings of it were emerging a couple of years before. As usual, music was the harbinger.

Last.fm was founded in 2002 by a group of four Austrian and German students who wanted to create a music recommendation system based on collaborative filtering.

Audioscrobbler, created by British student Richard Jones, was a plugin that tracked what music users played on their computers and uploaded that data to a central server.

The merger of Last.fm and Audioscrobbler in 2005 created a comprehensive social music platform that combined recommendation algorithms with actual listening data.