Wow, that's a lot of changes! It sort of looks like you went from an OSX-esque appearance to Metro... that's quite interesting.

I do this with all my projects just to see both my progress in learning UX/UI and also my thoughts. I've learned a lot by taking a look at what I thought was "amazing" then the next "amazing" and so on until I got the "perfect" design. For me, the #1 thing I've learned is to leave trying to perfect the design until the real data is available. It makes such a huge difference that I always, without exception, change some aspects of the design as soon as the data is displayed. Just my experiences over the years.

Thanks for sharing. One can clearly see

* the "I like last.fm" moment,

* the "let's make the content bigger" moment,

* the "actually I prefer Facebook" moment,

* the "ehi, Soundcloud is cool after all" moment,

* finally the "maybe I found my identity" moment.

Thanks! It's was interesting to see how a 3rd party view made different connections, especially as some of your correlations never crossed my mind. Notably, the red header was a short-term random color test (I tried tons). The timeline was actually inspired by a dribbble shot I ran across for mac app. Souncloud certainly had minor influences, I do love waveforms :P (not sure what the "moment" was though).

EDIT: You did forget the Rdio phase :). I do love their UI. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to get the cover look right with the complex titles and art I often deal with.

There is also the "let's jump on the Metro UI train". Which is the current style. But I preferred some of the screenshots to the actual result.

I too liked the gradiented look a lot, but I'll say having spent a ton of time with the site I love a current look so much more for a music site. Though rather than jumping on some train there was actually quite a few steps that brought me there. I tried a lot of things, but honestly it's just easier and cleaner to strip details when they are unnecessary, and I added some twists on it (I like having the flat bevel on the buttons).

Just thought I'd note that the influences often came from multiple not-obvious places and decisions, or even, maybe, just occasionally, perhaps, from me!

This is a great example of showing clients how UX is not something you just create and never revisit. Thanks for sharing!

Nice post; it'd be even better if the content displayed (a db seed?) was the same, making comparisons easier.

What no slick video flipbook?

I thought the flickr interface was pretty slick: I only had to wait for an image to load once, right at the beginning.