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!
– Toby
Play in Rhapsody – Lately we’ve been pretty excited about 
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