yugenro

I am a *huge* fan of Last.fm. But there is one *glaring* problem with their site: it does not distinguish between two artists of the same name.

Here is a letter I just wrote them, in response to their response to my first complaint about this issue:

I understand that Last.fm has no provision for distinguishing two artists of the same name…

However, I’m sure this problem is driving artists to avoid using Last.fm to promote themselves. I know I *love* everything about Last.fm *except* for this issue. Why can’t you make some provision for identically-named artists to move their sites to a new artist name? I am currently doing this exact thing, except by manually downloading all my music to my local machine, changing all my “artist name” tags in the mp3s to a new artist name, and re-upping them.

It looks like the core problem here is that Last.fm is taking the artist name from the mp3 tag. If you were to have an artist manually type in their name *before* uploading any music, like in a form on their Music Upload page, then you could check that artist name against your listing of already-existing artist names, and ensure that a *unique* artist name is entered. Otherwise, you get “Identity Theft”– you mash all this different music together.

I mean, that’s what happened to me: I was super-thrilled with Last.fm for a couple years, until one day I hit my page to find that an Italian heavy-metal band had “stolen my identity!” Now, I have nothing against Italian heavy metal or ANY music, but I AM rather upset about this seemingly-easily-avoided problem.

What would ANY OTHER online space do to ensure that two people of the same name were kept separate and unique?

Thank you,
K—- R—–

“Yugenro“: the artist formerly known as “Yugen“