It was sort of a good-news-bad-news kind of email. Toby Padilla, founder of MusicMobs, wrote in to let me know that he was joining Last.fm as VP of desktop & client software, and will be working on developing cool products for the social music company based in London. The bad news: MusicMobs, well-known for their Mobster recommendation software, was shutting down. (See, Mobster in the iTunes Hood.)
Almost four years old, MusicMobs never really hit the mainstream, even though some of us with terabytes of music always appreciated Mobster’s ability to find songs in our libraries. In many ways, it was too early to the social music game. Toby pretty much says so on MusicMobs.com.
Over the last couple of years things have begun to change. … Many competitive services were launching and our own costs were starting to grow beyond our ability to support them. I ended up spending less and less time developing the site and more time looking into ways we could survive and grow into a service everyone could use.
Toby tells us all playlists are available for download. “There was just too much overlap between what I had built and what they have. It was really taxing my resources as well. I felt that I could focus 100% on creating cool products if I didn’t have to maintain the legacy codebase/site. I am a bit sad about it though,” he wrote in an email. So are we.
3 trackbacks so far
10:12 AM PT
[...] Om blogs that MusicMobs has shut down. [...]
11:15 AM PT
[...] read more | digg story [...]
11:19 PM PT
[...] based in London. The bad news: MusicMobs, well-known for their Mobster recommendation software, waread more | digg [...]
9 comments so far
8:08 AM PT
Thanks Om, I definitely have some mix feelings. I do think the Last.fm/Musicmobs mix will yield some cool results though.
8:29 AM PT
Lets hope so Toby. I always like Mobster and want you to come up with something cooler.
9:43 AM PT
As cool as MusicMobs was, I’m more excited about what Padilla will do at Last.fm. He’ll have a chance to bring his cool software to a much, much larger audience.
11:36 AM PT
Sad to see MusicMobs go, but it was a good run and I’m sure it’ll carry on into Last.fm.
2:47 PM PT
I agree with you guys. I was totally smitten with mobster and believe that toby is going to come upw ith something cool. game on, as they say.
4:02 PM PT
It was a great service. But the economics was not there.
8:42 PM PT
We’ll wish them luck. I enjoyed MusicMobs the last several years, and look forward to what new features Last.FM will bring. Both are fun services.
3:29 AM PT
Sad to hear the news, but also excited to see what new innovations Last.FM will come up with. One this is for sure, the next 4 years are going to rock. When one looks at all the really cool advances being made, I am excited to see the next 4 years.
All the best,
Jake
Thought you might want to read the below post:
Musicmobs Joins The Last.fm Social Music Revolution
I started Musicmobs four years ago as personal project and an exploration into social music. When we launched things looked quite different than they do today. The phrase “Web 2.0″ had never been uttered, Audioscrobbler was the only social music tool, Friendster was at the height of popularity and people were beginning to see the power of user driven content and bottom up design.
Since then, I’ve devoted my life to developing Musicmobs and social music discovery. You’ve seen a lot of this work on the site and with Mobster. I’ve also spent a significant portion of my time developing music industry relations and in two-way conversations about how people will be listening to music in the future.
Over the last couple of years things have begun to change. Musicmobs continued to grow to its current state thanks to all of our passionate users and the excellent help from Maribel, Chris and Jeff, but I knew this wasn’t going to be enough. Many competitive services were launching and our own costs were starting to grow beyond our ability to support them.
I ended up spending less and less time developing the site and more time looking into ways we could survive and grow into a service everyone could use. This led to much soul searching about the direction Musicmobs should take and where I wanted to be in the future.
I explored MANY options. Some were to go it alone as a startup, others were to join a large company or larger startup and continue to innovate with a greater pool of resources.
Late last year I started talking to Last.fm to see if the most obvious fit was also the best. Those conversations ended up getting put on hold as they went through their sale to CBS. Shortly following the acquisition, Last.fm reached out to see if I was still interested in the possibility of joining them.
A couple of flights to London later, it was pretty obvious that we should be working together. Not only was their vision nearly identical to my own, but we all got along extremely well and I was thrilled to hear that they were big fans of Musicmobs!
Specifically, they really liked what we had done with Mobster. A lot of what Musicmobs.com does is duplicated on Last.fm but Mobster continues to be a unique application. This was very exciting to hear since I always felt Mobster was one of the best parts of Musicmobs. Unfortunately, it was a piece that was really hard to keep growing since it required development on multiple evolving platforms.
In the end, I accepted Last.fm’s offer to help create the social music dream team :) I’ll be heading up the desktop and client software division and working with some really amazing people to take the Last.fm desktop player to the next level.
Unfortunately, this does mean that Musicmobs will be coming down so I can focus on moving forward. Fortunately, since my vision was so inline with Last.fm’s, I will get to continue to develop on the ideas that have grown over the last four years. In many ways my work with Last.fm will be Musicmobs version 3.
I would like to thank all of the users that made Musicmobs what it is. It’s been an honor serving you to the best of my ability. I hope you’ll join me on Last.fm so we can continue to be on the cutting edge of music!
Musicmobs on Last.fm: Toby Maribel Chris Jeff
4:07 AM PT
Darn I really enjoyed this… Last.FM to me is lacking!
I’ve tried out (link) and (link) , the latter not what I expected … LoL
Anyone know something else like MusicMobs, besides Last.FM?
Leave a Comment