Richard Jones
Last.fm

Richard Jones is co-founder and CTO of Last.fm, a music recommendation service that helps users discover music based on the songs they play. Jones founded the company in 2000 with Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel. In one of the largest Web 2.0 acquisitions in the United Kingdom, the company was sold to CBS Interactive in 2007 for $280 million.

Pedro Santos: Can you tell us a bit about the story of how you started Audioscrobbler and how that led to Last.fm?

Richard Jones: Okay. In 2002, I was studying computer science at the University of Southampton in the UK and I started working on Audioscrobbler for my final year project. In my third year of university we had to do an individual project. My original intention was to collect this data on what people were listening to and then do a lot of collaborative filtering with the data in order to generate recommendations. So my original intentions were to build a music recommender. I saw the collection of that data as a means. I needed to get good data in order to be able to produce good recommendations. What happened is I wrote a Winamp plug-in. This was in 2002, so a lot more people had internet connections always on and Napster had made MP3 really popular and ....