The designers of Past.fm wanted to create an object that would let listeners explore their own music history. The problem they identified, however, is that, for a new generation of listeners, that history will mostly exist in a digital form.
The object is simple: it's a wooden speaker enclosure with an LCD screen, a single sliding handle, and a slot to insert an RFID token to switch between listeners' histories. The sliding handle is used to navigate through one's musical timeline (stored in a Last.fm account, naturally), playing a new track at every position using Spotify.
The success of the design is that Razan Sadeq, Hideaki Matsui, and Zubin Pastakia at the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design didn't try to mimic an experience younger listeners never actually had. There's no large color screen for album art, no liner notes, and no suggestion that albums should be listened to from start to finish. The experience is closer to finding an organized catalog of every vaguely-titled mixtape or burned CD you once made and excitedly clicking through old favorites.
But not everything about the way we listen to music has changed, and an important quality of the design is that past.fm is geared towards a shared listening experience. The Minority Report-esque token balls pop in and out, and are meant to be swapped with friends, just like mixtapes.