The best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recommend based on my profile. I got introduced to varied music, different genres and even a bit from different countries.
The worst was Pandora, which did recommendations based on breakdown of musical instruments and elements in the song. It did what it aimed to do pretty well, only it was a bad idea. It gave you a lot of uninspiring music that sounded like a bland copy of something you actually liked.
Spotify's recommendations are not super awful, but definitely feel closer to Pandora's style. I wonder why is the result like that even though I'm sure they train their model based on listening history.
I used to pay for their radio service, it was a bit like Pandora. I found it when they added it to Xbox 360 as an app.
I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into.
But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it.
I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.
The best way to discover music nowadays is RateYourMusic. I go to an album I like, read a couple reviews to find like-minded people and check out their profiles. They often have lists with their favorite albums.
The album chart queries are also incredible. The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors so you can find exactly what you want.
Audiotree has turned me on to several of my favorite bands as of late. Low hit rate (I probably only care for 5% of the music they feature at most) but those couple bands have been worth sifting through the rest.
> The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors
My problem with this is that it makes certain assumptions about the consistency of applying genres and about the very concept of genre which (imo) is more of a social construct than an empirical concept. It falls in the same category as religion-sect, language-dialect.
what.cd was the world's greatest music discovery mechanism. You could always ask for recommendations in the forums or in the comment thread of the albums pages. The community always delivered. I miss that type of camaraderie. I also spent more on music as a member of that community than since it has been disbanded.
What.cd was the Library of Alexandria for recorded music, the depth of what was collated and properly labelled there was far beyond anything that has ever existed on any other service, paid for or not. Every permutation of every release, endless live recordings, often multiple of the same event, absolutely incredible.
Private trackers as I understand it, are still a thing in the mid 2020s. Did a replacement that matches (or surpasses) What.cd not pop up in the meantime?
I'm just wondering how a strong community like that was struck a deathblow. It's not like all of its content disappeared.
Orpheus and redacted (previously passtheheadphones) both appeared shortly after what.cd’s demise. I believe they both now have more total torrents than what.cd, however the depth is still not what what’s was 9 years on (I know this because some of my uploads from what are still missing, partially because I no longer have the source material). And, the “cultivation” (ensuring no duplicates, recommendations for releases, general community, etc) is nowhere near what’s.
I would say all other media (or at least, the media I care about - film, tv, books) has what.cd equivalents, sometimes multiple. I think Spotify and AM killed 95%+ of “true” private tracker interest for music, especially with lossless and surround releases being available. The diehard core are still there (names from 15 years ago are still active) but it’s really not the same.
Orpheus and Redacted existed but it's kind of hard to beat the convenience of streaming for the low price in 2025.
Granted you can set up automated *arr systems with PLEXAMP to get a pretty seamless "personal Spotify" setup IME getting true usefulness out of trackers of What's quality always required spending real money - to obtain rare records/CDs on marketplaces - or at least large amounts of time if you went the "rent CDs from the library" route. I personally haven't ran into much RYM releases lacking on Apple Music and what is lacking I can find on Bandcamp or YouTube.
OiNK before that, too. Once waffles and what disappeared then I was never 'able' to get on to one of the newer ones… the whole process is some real archaic thing. Used to have a great 'profile' on those others, but yeah.
My favorite manual discovery/social was Napster, for that moment that you could view other user’s entire shared music folder and use the chat function to talk to them about their tastes!
I was just talking about this in r/piracy but I remember there was a chat function on Kazaa where you could message people you were downloading music from and ask for recommendations. Simpler times...
In my experience Spotify's song/playlist recommendations are not great, but the album recommendations have a pretty high hit rate. I'm not sure why this would be.
Did they get a lot better recently? For years I rarely even looked at them because they were so banal and repetitive, but about six months ago they suddenly became something to stay on top of.
> I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres.
This has been until very recently the modus operandi of most recommendation engine algorithms. If an algorithm is essentially doing what you do, would you not like that?
So, all I’m hearing is that, when we actually took the humans out of the loop and replaced them with algorithms, all the humanity disappeared?
”If take human out … why human there no more???”
It’s shocking this species is able to come up with such advanced technologies when the above is the existential question that plagues them in the macro.
I find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year.
It feels to me like "dark mode" (which is a merely single color of customization for an app). We expect so little from our software and services that even these little, previously common features are supposed to be a treat.
Anyway, Last.fm was great -- I never used it that much for discovery, but rather to get insight into what I was listening to. Largely, it didn't say THAT much about my habits because I mostly just listened to my collection on random. My top bands were, for the most part, the bands I had the most of.
I'm on a music discord server (for metal), most people share their weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly charts made from their last.fm data. Here's what I posted yesterday for my weekly: https://i.imgur.com/6jYS8jG.png
>I find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year.
Skill issue. you can export your listening history whenever you like.
If you use Spotify, you can download your full listening history here: https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/. You get it in a pretty convenient JSON format and with a little bit of code it's pretty easy to create some visualizations.
There are also websites for visualizing this data. I'm quite fond of this one: https://explorify.link/. It allows you to do some custom queries.
I build a web app years ago with Spotify SDK to display top artists, songs, recents, also with a Discovery section that generates new music based on your history. You can create playlists from all sections. free @ https://echoesapp.io
Note that apps built from the SDK don't have access to the full history, only up to some cutoff. I tried a couple over the years and wrongly concluded Spotify deleted your history after some time.
The data download does contain everything, which was a very pleasant surprise. I didn't think I'd ever see the data from the couple years gap in my last.fm.
> They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?
There's probably one person nursing some horrific bogslop software that frequently breaks but absolutely cannot be rewritten or changed (because it was someone's pet project) and frequently has to be manually twizzled to get things out of what is probably a hostile data retrieval environment and they're just TIRED and that's why there's a 30 day leeway because otherwise the Data Retrieval Goblin would be way over the line of overwhelmed rather than just under it all the time.
Probably.
(I realise I've likely described a significant percentage of companies there.)
Last.fm is still used quite a bit, mainly as a listening history tracker rather than a radio or recommendation engine.
Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling. For everything else it's a lot more DIY, usually with third party tools at the device level.
A big reason it’s still relevant is the ecosystem around it. The API hasn't really changed in 15 years, which makes it easy to build tools where a username alone is enough. That kind of lightweight social integration has mostly disappeared elsewhere.
Today, the social / community side is almost entirely just Discord. Nearly every music related server has a bot that displays Last.fm stats. My estimate is that abut 10% of Last.fm their users are also active in Discord music communities.
(Disclaimer: I run .fmbot, a Discord bot that integrates with Last.fm.)
These integrations are lacking compared to Spotify. For example in Tidal you have to set it for each device where you install the app, and it doesn't work with things like casting. It's easy to forget to set it up which can cause gaps in your history.
The Plex integration gets pretty close to native, but it only scrobbles after a track is done, it doesn't have 'Now Playing' support.
As for Deezer and Quobuz I'm not sure. Afaik Spotify still stands alone by being set-and-forget, working on any device and having full feature support.
Yeah, this seems to be the case for a lot of people. I frequently get support tickets asking how to connect Apple Music. There are some alternative players you can use, but it's not really an accessible solution suitable for mainstream use
Other recommendations in other siblings, but Neptunes on macOS and Finale on iOS are excellent. I only got into it a couple years ago, but aside from a few quirks, using those two has been super smooth and easy.
Last.fm isn't really expanding their API unfortunately. You can however see Last.fm stats in the main artist/album/track commands.
As for spammyness, I'm aware this is an issue. For non-bot channels I recommend using .togglecommand and enabling just a few specific commands, and setting a small embed mode so .fm commands don't take up too much space in chat.
Just one admin's opinion, but I think the bot spam thing is more a matter of server etiquette than anything. Sure, I'm all for #bot-spam channels, but nobody looks at those unless they're using it, so it's not very useful for things like sharing last.fm stats. I'd much rather people use it sensibly in a #music channel.
I love last.fm with all my being. I recently created a ListenBrainz (same org as MusicBrainz) account which is an open source alternative that you don’t have to host yourself. I’m scrobbling to both places now just in case.
Check out tapmusic.net too to make cool diagrams out of your scrobbled music.
I'm using selfhosted multi scrobbler [0] to scrobble to lfm, listenbrainz, and selfhosted koito [1].
Maybe not super useful, but fun ;) when at home, I scrobble to MS which distributes the data, when I have no VPN active on the go, I scrobble to last.fm only, which then gets used as source by MS as well, to redistribute it to the others.
I still use Last.fm! I've had it since 2008. It's really cool seeing how my music taste has changed, and seeing what I've come back to over and over again.
When I used to be much more active in online music communities I would post a 9x9 of my most listened to albums of the past week and discuss them.
Still scrobbling since 2008. A lot of smaller artists used to upload their music to last.fm, and I found a lot of gems there (specifically in the swedish bitpop scene).
Ha! I am still using Last.fm 21 years after first discovering it. I would say my current music taste is largely thanks to Last.fm and its compatibility and "Similar Artists" features.
Funny enough iTunes Genius was amazing at discovering new music as it created a tree of "users who bought this, also bought these songs" and I spent a fortune on the iTunes Store on single songs.
It's now all but dead, probably because with apple getting a monthly cut with Apple Music either way, there's no incentive to maintain such a system.
Funnily enough, I'm trying to do this, and just posted in "What are you Working On?" Not sure I'll have much luck if Apple couldn't make it happen though!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268285
They do? It's pretty limited but if you tap your profile photo at the bottom of Music and then tap your profile photo in the menu again it'll bring you to a "Apple Music profile" of sorts you can follow people with.
I just moved my scrobbling to a self-hosted instance of Koito after switching from Spotify to Jellyfin. Very happy with the change, as I can still share all my music data with friends
When I read the negative take on "it's always somebody else selecting the music for you" I really recoiled. My favorite way to listen to music today is BECAUSE there is someone choosing it for me. I love the human stories behind the music, and it is totally missing with algorithmic stuff. I love Gilles Peterson, and Derek Smith on KMHD, for example, exactly because they are terrific and interesting people and they bring that humanity with their choice of tracks. When they interview people it is so much more interesting as a companion to the music.
My favorite thing about Napster and LimeWire was when you could find a song, and then BROWSE the hard drive of the person hosting that song. It was so interesting to find house music and be digging through the tastes of someone in London. And, then chatting with them, and discovering the live scenes, the people behind the music, etc. I loved that and nothing has ever replaced it.
Having said all this, I am interested in playing with "scrobbling." Anyone have any advice on how to get started? Do you need a music library? Is there a way to import your playlists from YouTube music? I'm not a spotify person.
> When I read the negative take on "it's always somebody else selecting the music for you" I really recoiled.
Someone clearly didn't listen to John Peel and Andy Kershaw in their youth.
(also, IN MY DAY, it was generally somebody else selecting the music for you - radio DJs/programmers, TV music shows, availability of things in shops, being able to actually get to the damn shops, etc. None of this choose your own adventure streaming or digital music malarkey.)
i used to use last.fm with winamp and the like. that needed scrobbling plugins. nowadays, i use it with spotify, and it's pretty simple: (1) make an account on last.fm. (2) go into spotify settings → social → connected apps, and add it in.
Last.fm was probably my first social network, although it probably doesn't make it justice to call it that! I am still scrobbling after so many years! Loved this article. Really good memories... Thx for sharing
https://listenbrainz.org/ is an open source scrobbler, with the advantage that it leverages the musicbrainz database and connects listens to artist and track IDs instead of names, avoiding duplicate confusion. You can keep last.fm and submit to both of you like.
I'd stopped scrobbling like 10 years ago, but recently got into it again.
My 16yo son discovered Last.fm and scrobblibg and got me to install the Jellyfin scrobbler plugin. And I recovered my old account! I got some boomer music jokes from him, but it was worth it.
Sep 23, 2004 here! 285k scrobbles. Always been a loyal user. My use goes back far enough that I would have scrobbles queued up for when my dialup connection came online to push the days’ missed scrobbles up.
I initially moved to it because Shortcuts broke my "generate 2h of music I rarely listen to" shortcut (it stopped being able to add music to playlists - hilarious for an in-house app talking to an in-house app!) and someone suggested Marvis because it has a "dynamic smart playlist" and it also has integrated scrobbling.
You can pretty much replace the Apple Music frontend with Marvis (at least on iOS) and everything works the same (because it's still using Music as its backend.)
I miss the old last.fm. I know it's still there, but it's not the same since CBS took over and made everything rely on youtube or whatever it's doing these days.
I worked at Last.fm from 2007 to 2012. The MIR team (think: research) developed a wonderful system called "RadioQL", which allowed you to stitch together custom ratio stations from any of a huge host of factors, joined together by AND, OR, and NOT. You could select artist radios, song radios, tags, and so on, but also combine this with things like the BPM or even some sentiment analysis. It was used a little bit inside some public-facing radio stations, but nobody outside of the staff ever got full access, and that's a tragedy as it was glorious.
The thing with data is that you have to act on it for it to be useful, and this data is useful only to recommendation engineers. Spotify's end-of-year summary is more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.
Silly curiosity - what's that "BEAM-appreciator" in that bio? I could only think of a protein brand name (that too not from my geography) shortened as BEAM :/
Earlier this year I decided to move away from streaming platforms and rebuild my local music collection and serve it out over Plex. Plex supports last.fm so everything gets recorded there.
I also use the following docker containers on my home server:
This allows me to share my last.fm input to both a local scrobbler (Koito) and to listenbrainz - I figured having this data in multiple locations makes it a bit more safe.
Honestly between last.fm and listenbrainz I find myself exploring more on listenbrainz - even though most of it's users don't really fit the same listening profile I do.
If you want something that doesn't require a docker container to run but still supports multiple targets, I'm maintaining a small linux daemon for that: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler
for my use case I think the docker container is better solution. I listen on several different devices so having plexamp send everything to last.fm and use that as the "source of truth" and then the docker container monitors last.fm and resends that info to other targets makes a bit more sense - this way I never have to make sure I have something running on my listening device.
I got a last.FM story. I used last.fm for years, then wanted tot use it again after a hiatus. But was locked out of my account, and the email I used of that service didn't exist anymore. I contacted last.fm saying what the old email was, and told them the profile picture was from a guitarist from an obscure islandic band, who's blonde hair I photo shopped into brown, so he looked more like me. They gave we a reset link. Very happy to use it again. I do wonder how they stay afloat.
I would guess that after so long, and without the feature creep so many platforms suffer from, last.fm has a very simple and affordable infrastructure. It's also owned by Paramount, so likely a small drop in the bucket for them. They also have ads and subs, so.
Been scrobbling since 2008. I found out what last.fm was thanks to installing Rockbox on my iPod nano, and seeing they had this "scrobbling" feature. Had to remember to plug in the iPod, pull the scrobble log and upload it using a website someone created.
I still use last.fm. Been continously scrobbling since 2004. I also export my last.fm and Spotify listening history every now and again just in case. I plan to one day make a timeline of my listens overlayed on top of world and personal events.
I made friends I still have by browsing people who had a compatible music taste to me and then reaching out to chat.
ooo... i thought Last.fm was a rebranding of audioscrobbler; i didn't know it was a parallel project. and I am an audioscrobbler user since 2006! and I've used it to this day, i mean, last.fm.
I filed my collaborative filtering patent in 1995, describing the core basic way that your “desert island 5 favorite albums”, and the 5 favorites list from many other people, could be used to recommend music you would like. The patent is a nice tutorial on how it is done, check it out here if you’d like:
Yeah yeah it was a software patent. If that bugs you, you can take solace in the fact that I blew it executing on monetizing it. Microsoft ended up owning it and I went on to other adventures.
It seems like some of it was, but for full albums of artists they just redirected it to the official artist uploads on YouTube. But, then if those links change it breaks old playlists and I lose track of it.
It was just such a convoluted mess. They promised you could upload all your music and it would be there forever, they said! Bastards...
I stopped scrobbling many years ago when they messed together my top artist at the time (the lovely "alan", spelled with all small letters) with other entirely unrelated artists by the same name (but with different letter case, e.g. some "Alan" this, and some "Alan" that.) It didn't represent at all what I was actually listening to, so what was the point?
It has always been like this. It's a super simple system. All artists are only identified by their name. So there are a ton of artist pages out there that actually have to represent multiple artists with the same name. It's kinda silly, but oh well.
Used their API to pull tag data as part of a project not too long ago and had to spend a disappointing amount of time filtering out literal hate tags/slurs and widespread deliberate mistagging.
It caused me to not make the code public until I can ship it with an allowlist. It's almost done but I got distracted
The best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recommend based on my profile. I got introduced to varied music, different genres and even a bit from different countries.
The worst was Pandora, which did recommendations based on breakdown of musical instruments and elements in the song. It did what it aimed to do pretty well, only it was a bad idea. It gave you a lot of uninspiring music that sounded like a bland copy of something you actually liked.
Spotify's recommendations are not super awful, but definitely feel closer to Pandora's style. I wonder why is the result like that even though I'm sure they train their model based on listening history.
I used to pay for their radio service, it was a bit like Pandora. I found it when they added it to Xbox 360 as an app.
I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into.
But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it.
I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.
The best way to discover music nowadays is RateYourMusic. I go to an album I like, read a couple reviews to find like-minded people and check out their profiles. They often have lists with their favorite albums.
The album chart queries are also incredible. The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors so you can find exactly what you want.
my method is just internet/local radio stations ( there are many ) and browsing the lineups at venues near me
simple, very little time investment required and avoids most modern fuckery
Audiotree has turned me on to several of my favorite bands as of late. Low hit rate (I probably only care for 5% of the music they feature at most) but those couple bands have been worth sifting through the rest.
Shout out to KEXP!
looks cool I'll check them out, FWIW lately for me it's mostly chirpradio.org and somafm
> The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors
My problem with this is that it makes certain assumptions about the consistency of applying genres and about the very concept of genre which (imo) is more of a social construct than an empirical concept. It falls in the same category as religion-sect, language-dialect.
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what.cd was the world's greatest music discovery mechanism. You could always ask for recommendations in the forums or in the comment thread of the albums pages. The community always delivered. I miss that type of camaraderie. I also spent more on music as a member of that community than since it has been disbanded.
What.cd was the Library of Alexandria for recorded music, the depth of what was collated and properly labelled there was far beyond anything that has ever existed on any other service, paid for or not. Every permutation of every release, endless live recordings, often multiple of the same event, absolutely incredible.
Private trackers as I understand it, are still a thing in the mid 2020s. Did a replacement that matches (or surpasses) What.cd not pop up in the meantime?
I'm just wondering how a strong community like that was struck a deathblow. It's not like all of its content disappeared.
Orpheus and redacted (previously passtheheadphones) both appeared shortly after what.cd’s demise. I believe they both now have more total torrents than what.cd, however the depth is still not what what’s was 9 years on (I know this because some of my uploads from what are still missing, partially because I no longer have the source material). And, the “cultivation” (ensuring no duplicates, recommendations for releases, general community, etc) is nowhere near what’s.
I would say all other media (or at least, the media I care about - film, tv, books) has what.cd equivalents, sometimes multiple. I think Spotify and AM killed 95%+ of “true” private tracker interest for music, especially with lossless and surround releases being available. The diehard core are still there (names from 15 years ago are still active) but it’s really not the same.
Orpheus and Redacted existed but it's kind of hard to beat the convenience of streaming for the low price in 2025.
Granted you can set up automated *arr systems with PLEXAMP to get a pretty seamless "personal Spotify" setup IME getting true usefulness out of trackers of What's quality always required spending real money - to obtain rare records/CDs on marketplaces - or at least large amounts of time if you went the "rent CDs from the library" route. I personally haven't ran into much RYM releases lacking on Apple Music and what is lacking I can find on Bandcamp or YouTube.
It did, took only a few weeks iirc.
OiNK before that, too. Once waffles and what disappeared then I was never 'able' to get on to one of the newer ones… the whole process is some real archaic thing. Used to have a great 'profile' on those others, but yeah.
My favorite manual discovery/social was Napster, for that moment that you could view other user’s entire shared music folder and use the chat function to talk to them about their tastes!
I was just talking about this in r/piracy but I remember there was a chat function on Kazaa where you could message people you were downloading music from and ask for recommendations. Simpler times...
Shameless plug: I'm building volt.fm for Spotify (3M users) which like last.fm lets you find people with similar taste.
You can even save their top songs as an auto-updating playlist. It's a great way to find new music that is not controlled by algorithms.
Here's my profile if anyone wants to have a look: https://volt.fm/soheilpro
I've signed in and see my profile – how do I find people with similar taste?
In my experience Spotify's song/playlist recommendations are not great, but the album recommendations have a pretty high hit rate. I'm not sure why this would be.
Did they get a lot better recently? For years I rarely even looked at them because they were so banal and repetitive, but about six months ago they suddenly became something to stay on top of.
I started using spotify about 5 years ago, if you're a long time user I don't really know what it was like before then.
Fond memories of browsing my downloaders on soulseek
You can still do exactly this on bandcamp!
I found so much indie electronic music I loved to listen to back then, via last fm. I don’t listen to any of it any more. Or have any interest to
say more?
> I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres.
This has been until very recently the modus operandi of most recommendation engine algorithms. If an algorithm is essentially doing what you do, would you not like that?
So, all I’m hearing is that, when we actually took the humans out of the loop and replaced them with algorithms, all the humanity disappeared?
”If take human out … why human there no more???”
It’s shocking this species is able to come up with such advanced technologies when the above is the existential question that plagues them in the macro.
Aren't these social features still active?
I find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year.
It feels to me like "dark mode" (which is a merely single color of customization for an app). We expect so little from our software and services that even these little, previously common features are supposed to be a treat.
Anyway, Last.fm was great -- I never used it that much for discovery, but rather to get insight into what I was listening to. Largely, it didn't say THAT much about my habits because I mostly just listened to my collection on random. My top bands were, for the most part, the bands I had the most of.
Last.fm used to only update your listening stats on Friday, which turned into a fun event where everyone shared what they heard that week.
Eventually the stats became live updating and a bit of fun was lost.
I'm on a music discord server (for metal), most people share their weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly charts made from their last.fm data. Here's what I posted yesterday for my weekly: https://i.imgur.com/6jYS8jG.png
>I find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year.
Skill issue. you can export your listening history whenever you like.
I'm a big fan of last.fm.
If you use Spotify, you can download your full listening history here: https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/. You get it in a pretty convenient JSON format and with a little bit of code it's pretty easy to create some visualizations.
There are also websites for visualizing this data. I'm quite fond of this one: https://explorify.link/. It allows you to do some custom queries.
I build a web app years ago with Spotify SDK to display top artists, songs, recents, also with a Discovery section that generates new music based on your history. You can create playlists from all sections. free @ https://echoesapp.io
Tried it out now, pretty nice.
Note that apps built from the SDK don't have access to the full history, only up to some cutoff. I tried a couple over the years and wrongly concluded Spotify deleted your history after some time.
The data download does contain everything, which was a very pleasant surprise. I didn't think I'd ever see the data from the couple years gap in my last.fm.
Just requested my data. They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?
It typically shows up in a few days in the most extreme cases (10k+ artists, 200k+ songs played) the first time, sooner after that
> They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?
There's probably one person nursing some horrific bogslop software that frequently breaks but absolutely cannot be rewritten or changed (because it was someone's pet project) and frequently has to be manually twizzled to get things out of what is probably a hostile data retrieval environment and they're just TIRED and that's why there's a 30 day leeway because otherwise the Data Retrieval Goblin would be way over the line of overwhelmed rather than just under it all the time.
Probably.
(I realise I've likely described a significant percentage of companies there.)
It's the maximum time allowed by GDPR but it usually is way faster, depending on how much data you have.
Arrived today. 19,4 MB (:
Discouraging you to do it again.
Thanks for the tip. I just logged in to my Spotify account for the first time in years so I can export my data :)
Last.fm is still used quite a bit, mainly as a listening history tracker rather than a radio or recommendation engine.
Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling. For everything else it's a lot more DIY, usually with third party tools at the device level.
A big reason it’s still relevant is the ecosystem around it. The API hasn't really changed in 15 years, which makes it easy to build tools where a username alone is enough. That kind of lightweight social integration has mostly disappeared elsewhere.
Today, the social / community side is almost entirely just Discord. Nearly every music related server has a bot that displays Last.fm stats. My estimate is that abut 10% of Last.fm their users are also active in Discord music communities.
(Disclaimer: I run .fmbot, a Discord bot that integrates with Last.fm.)
> Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling.
That's not true. It's missing from Apple Music but present in Tidal, Deezer, and Quobuz. It also works well with Plex.
A large list from them: https://support.last.fm/t/more-ways-to-scrobble/192
These integrations are lacking compared to Spotify. For example in Tidal you have to set it for each device where you install the app, and it doesn't work with things like casting. It's easy to forget to set it up which can cause gaps in your history.
The Plex integration gets pretty close to native, but it only scrobbles after a track is done, it doesn't have 'Now Playing' support.
As for Deezer and Quobuz I'm not sure. Afaik Spotify still stands alone by being set-and-forget, working on any device and having full feature support.
Qobuz works the same way. Set and forget. Don’t know about deezer.
Deezer is the same: set it and forget it once at a platform level.
Missing last.fm support is the only thing keeping me from switching from Spotify to Apple Music
There are 3rd-party apps that have near seamless Apple Music integration, at least on MacOS (Scrobbles for Last.fm) and iPhone (Marvis).
Yeah, this seems to be the case for a lot of people. I frequently get support tickets asking how to connect Apple Music. There are some alternative players you can use, but it's not really an accessible solution suitable for mainstream use
Other recommendations in other siblings, but Neptunes on macOS and Finale on iOS are excellent. I only got into it a couple years ago, but aside from a few quirks, using those two has been super smooth and easy.
Could you use your fame to get last.fm to extend their API to allow listening number checks so it's not only people who registered with your bot? ;)
Also thanks for your work, while I dislike the spammyness of it, that's on the server owners (main server I'm on limits it to one bot channel)
Last.fm isn't really expanding their API unfortunately. You can however see Last.fm stats in the main artist/album/track commands.
As for spammyness, I'm aware this is an issue. For non-bot channels I recommend using .togglecommand and enabling just a few specific commands, and setting a small embed mode so .fm commands don't take up too much space in chat.
Just one admin's opinion, but I think the bot spam thing is more a matter of server etiquette than anything. Sure, I'm all for #bot-spam channels, but nobody looks at those unless they're using it, so it's not very useful for things like sharing last.fm stats. I'd much rather people use it sensibly in a #music channel.
I love last.fm with all my being. I recently created a ListenBrainz (same org as MusicBrainz) account which is an open source alternative that you don’t have to host yourself. I’m scrobbling to both places now just in case.
Check out tapmusic.net too to make cool diagrams out of your scrobbled music.
I'm using selfhosted multi scrobbler [0] to scrobble to lfm, listenbrainz, and selfhosted koito [1].
Maybe not super useful, but fun ;) when at home, I scrobble to MS which distributes the data, when I have no VPN active on the go, I scrobble to last.fm only, which then gets used as source by MS as well, to redistribute it to the others.
[0] https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler
[1] https://github.com/gabehf/Koito/
Doesn't look like Tapmusic supports ListenBrainz; does it?
Then again, if all it does is collages, then ListenBrainz has a tool for that of its own.
libre.fm is also back at it!
tapmusic.org is currently parked by GoDaddy. Looks like you meant tapmusic.net
I still use Last.fm! I've had it since 2008. It's really cool seeing how my music taste has changed, and seeing what I've come back to over and over again.
When I used to be much more active in online music communities I would post a 9x9 of my most listened to albums of the past week and discuss them.
Also from this era and loosely related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace
Good lord, Oink was only around for 4 years? I was one of the earlier signups and it felt more like 10 years.
Maybe because what.cd picked up the torch and carried on for another few years? For me there was some sense of continuity between the two.
There was. Oink spawned both wcd and waffles. wcd spawned a few including RED.
Next thursday, RED will have been around longer than WCD...
Crazy
None of the successors captured oink for me (I proudly had their t-shirt), sadly.
[dead]
I miss it deeply.
Still scrobbling since 2008. A lot of smaller artists used to upload their music to last.fm, and I found a lot of gems there (specifically in the swedish bitpop scene).
Ha! I am still using Last.fm 21 years after first discovering it. I would say my current music taste is largely thanks to Last.fm and its compatibility and "Similar Artists" features.
I always thought Apple missed a huge opportunity to build a social network on top of iTunes.
See what your friends are listening to, develop communities around shared musical interests, get better recommendations. Sort of like YouTube now.
Funny enough iTunes Genius was amazing at discovering new music as it created a tree of "users who bought this, also bought these songs" and I spent a fortune on the iTunes Store on single songs.
It's now all but dead, probably because with apple getting a monthly cut with Apple Music either way, there's no incentive to maintain such a system.
iTunes Ping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
> Launched September 1, 2010
A bit late to the party.
Funnily enough, I'm trying to do this, and just posted in "What are you Working On?" Not sure I'll have much luck if Apple couldn't make it happen though! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268285
Looks interesting, how do you get it to sync what I'm listening to with it? I use Pandora & YT Music as my only music services.
Thanks! Good shout, will definitely add support for YouTube. Pandora, however, is sadly blocked in the UK.
They do? It's pretty limited but if you tap your profile photo at the bottom of Music and then tap your profile photo in the menu again it'll bring you to a "Apple Music profile" of sorts you can follow people with.
I just moved my scrobbling to a self-hosted instance of Koito after switching from Spotify to Jellyfin. Very happy with the change, as I can still share all my music data with friends
When I read the negative take on "it's always somebody else selecting the music for you" I really recoiled. My favorite way to listen to music today is BECAUSE there is someone choosing it for me. I love the human stories behind the music, and it is totally missing with algorithmic stuff. I love Gilles Peterson, and Derek Smith on KMHD, for example, exactly because they are terrific and interesting people and they bring that humanity with their choice of tracks. When they interview people it is so much more interesting as a companion to the music.
My favorite thing about Napster and LimeWire was when you could find a song, and then BROWSE the hard drive of the person hosting that song. It was so interesting to find house music and be digging through the tastes of someone in London. And, then chatting with them, and discovering the live scenes, the people behind the music, etc. I loved that and nothing has ever replaced it.
Having said all this, I am interested in playing with "scrobbling." Anyone have any advice on how to get started? Do you need a music library? Is there a way to import your playlists from YouTube music? I'm not a spotify person.
> My favorite thing about Napster and LimeWire was when you could find a song, and then BROWSE the hard drive of the person hosting that song.
Soulseek lets you do this and is still going
Soulseek is still going?
I discovered so many artists, international variations of albums, live sessions and bootlegs from that app, it changed my relationship with music.
I have to go back and check it out.
There's even a FOSS client now https://github.com/nicotine-plus/nicotine-plus
Nicotine+ has existed for at least 15 years. I'm pretty sure it was open source all this time.
while Soulseek has existed for 24 years, I mention it in case GP's use didn't overlap.
Soulseek is definitely still going, and absolutely still captures that feeling GP is talking about :)
Beyond that, and practically speaking, I find it the easiest way to find large, nicely organized discographies. And some not so nicely organized.
> When I read the negative take on "it's always somebody else selecting the music for you" I really recoiled.
Someone clearly didn't listen to John Peel and Andy Kershaw in their youth.
(also, IN MY DAY, it was generally somebody else selecting the music for you - radio DJs/programmers, TV music shows, availability of things in shops, being able to actually get to the damn shops, etc. None of this choose your own adventure streaming or digital music malarkey.)
If you use streaming you can link it to lastfm or Listenbrainz(open source alternative). It will automagically scrobble your listening over.
Otherwise you need to find a music player that supports it or has a plugin to add the functionality. I use tauron for scrobbling my local listening.
i used to use last.fm with winamp and the like. that needed scrobbling plugins. nowadays, i use it with spotify, and it's pretty simple: (1) make an account on last.fm. (2) go into spotify settings → social → connected apps, and add it in.
Last.fm was probably my first social network, although it probably doesn't make it justice to call it that! I am still scrobbling after so many years! Loved this article. Really good memories... Thx for sharing
https://listenbrainz.org/ is an open source scrobbler, with the advantage that it leverages the musicbrainz database and connects listens to artist and track IDs instead of names, avoiding duplicate confusion. You can keep last.fm and submit to both of you like.
This is what I have been using for so many years after I deleted/lost my last.fm account. It keeps working like little magical tool in the background.
I looked at libre.fm but I think all I ever saw was a waiting list.
I'm still scrobbling after all these years.
I left Spotify when their CEO made a military investment.
Breaking free from their recommendation algorithm and dedicating time to discovering music has been a transformative experience.
I am delighted that numerous tools still utilize scrobbling. My favorite recent discovery is Tapmusic. [0]
[0] https://www.tapmusic.net/
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I'd stopped scrobbling like 10 years ago, but recently got into it again.
My 16yo son discovered Last.fm and scrobblibg and got me to install the Jellyfin scrobbler plugin. And I recovered my old account! I got some boomer music jokes from him, but it was worth it.
Still a member of Last.fm, scrobbling since 4 Jan 2007 with 283,262 scrobbles.
17 Sep 2017, 93,463 scrobbles. Quite late to the party, eh?
Late to the party as well. Started on 3 Feb 2020 (lockdown era), 25,394 scrobbles.
Checking mine, scrobbling since 9 Oct 2006 with 297,127 scrobbles myself.
Sep 23, 2004 here! 285k scrobbles. Always been a loyal user. My use goes back far enough that I would have scrobbles queued up for when my dialup connection came online to push the days’ missed scrobbles up.
Jun 8th ‘07, 535,618k scrobbles.
My usage went way up once I was able to properly scrobble listens played via my hifi.
scrobbling since 10 Mar 2006 with 179,105 scrobbles.
Leading on start (15 Jan 2004) but woeful in the scrobbles (55164).
In my defence, it was only recently that you could sensibly scrobble from iOS with Marvis and I gave up on Spotify countless years ago.
What is Marvis? I'm transitioning from Spotify to Apple Music and Last.fm doesn't have integration. Does Marvis solves this problem?
https://www.macstories.net/reviews/marvis-review-the-ultra-c...
I initially moved to it because Shortcuts broke my "generate 2h of music I rarely listen to" shortcut (it stopped being able to add music to playlists - hilarious for an in-house app talking to an in-house app!) and someone suggested Marvis because it has a "dynamic smart playlist" and it also has integrated scrobbling.
You can pretty much replace the Apple Music frontend with Marvis (at least on iOS) and everything works the same (because it's still using Music as its backend.)
Sep 28, 2004 for me. Word must've spread that week.
nice!
I miss the old last.fm. I know it's still there, but it's not the same since CBS took over and made everything rely on youtube or whatever it's doing these days.
The built-in player made it competitive with Pandora at the time.
I worked at Last.fm from 2007 to 2012. The MIR team (think: research) developed a wonderful system called "RadioQL", which allowed you to stitch together custom ratio stations from any of a huge host of factors, joined together by AND, OR, and NOT. You could select artist radios, song radios, tags, and so on, but also combine this with things like the BPM or even some sentiment analysis. It was used a little bit inside some public-facing radio stations, but nobody outside of the staff ever got full access, and that's a tragedy as it was glorious.
Part of the quantified self movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_self
The thing with data is that you have to act on it for it to be useful, and this data is useful only to recommendation engineers. Spotify's end-of-year summary is more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.
Made a scrobbler program for cmus when I switched to it. [0]
Comparison of listeners really nails the recommendations. Similar minds like to listen to similar things.
0: https://github.com/vjeranc/cmus-status-scrobbler
Similarly I made a scrobbler app (on linux) that works with all players that expose MPRIS data: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler
Richard Jones is still alive and kicking https://x.com/metabrew
^ protected tweets. But he's also on Bsky:
https://bsky.app/profile/metabrew.com
Silly curiosity - what's that "BEAM-appreciator" in that bio? I could only think of a protein brand name (that too not from my geography) shortened as BEAM :/
Anyway I loved that he has reposted a post from musicbraniz https://bsky.app/profile/musicbrainz.org/post/3lnhvp23jc22l/...
I would guess it's referring to the Erlang VM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_(Erlang_virtual_machine)
Earlier this year I decided to move away from streaming platforms and rebuild my local music collection and serve it out over Plex. Plex supports last.fm so everything gets recorded there.
I also use the following docker containers on my home server:
Multi-Scrobbler: https://hub.docker.com/r/foxxmd/multi-scrobbler Koito: https://koito.io/guides/installation/
This allows me to share my last.fm input to both a local scrobbler (Koito) and to listenbrainz - I figured having this data in multiple locations makes it a bit more safe.
Honestly between last.fm and listenbrainz I find myself exploring more on listenbrainz - even though most of it's users don't really fit the same listening profile I do.
If you want something that doesn't require a docker container to run but still supports multiple targets, I'm maintaining a small linux daemon for that: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler
for my use case I think the docker container is better solution. I listen on several different devices so having plexamp send everything to last.fm and use that as the "source of truth" and then the docker container monitors last.fm and resends that info to other targets makes a bit more sense - this way I never have to make sure I have something running on my listening device.
I got a last.FM story. I used last.fm for years, then wanted tot use it again after a hiatus. But was locked out of my account, and the email I used of that service didn't exist anymore. I contacted last.fm saying what the old email was, and told them the profile picture was from a guitarist from an obscure islandic band, who's blonde hair I photo shopped into brown, so he looked more like me. They gave we a reset link. Very happy to use it again. I do wonder how they stay afloat.
I would guess that after so long, and without the feature creep so many platforms suffer from, last.fm has a very simple and affordable infrastructure. It's also owned by Paramount, so likely a small drop in the bucket for them. They also have ads and subs, so.
Been scrobbling since 2008. I found out what last.fm was thanks to installing Rockbox on my iPod nano, and seeing they had this "scrobbling" feature. Had to remember to plug in the iPod, pull the scrobble log and upload it using a website someone created.
If you need a scrobbler for Android (and Linux) I recommend Pano Scrobbler: https://github.com/kawaiiDango/pano-scrobbler
Lastfm stopped me moving from Spotify to Apple Music; none of the iOS scrobblers seem to consistently catch all listens.
Same!
I still use last.fm. Been continously scrobbling since 2004. I also export my last.fm and Spotify listening history every now and again just in case. I plan to one day make a timeline of my listens overlayed on top of world and personal events.
I made friends I still have by browsing people who had a compatible music taste to me and then reaching out to chat.
That would be an amazing app to journal your listening history like that with Spotify on the same phone
last.fm was so promising when it came out but i have to say i didn’t discover anything using their platform.
chatGPT is incredible, just giving it a single song and some context, it can recommend at a rate of something like 85-90%.
the only place i’ve gotten the BEST music recommendations were the oink and last.fm forums. humans, still, are the best recommendation infrastructure.
Memories. I wrote the initial Windows Media Player plugin for Audioscrobbler but didn't maintain it.
ooo... i thought Last.fm was a rebranding of audioscrobbler; i didn't know it was a parallel project. and I am an audioscrobbler user since 2006! and I've used it to this day, i mean, last.fm.
very interesting article!
I filed my collaborative filtering patent in 1995, describing the core basic way that your “desert island 5 favorite albums”, and the 5 favorites list from many other people, could be used to recommend music you would like. The patent is a nice tutorial on how it is done, check it out here if you’d like:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9d/f9/19/08ac5ef...
Here is part of the story on my website… I’ll write it up better one of these days:
https://www.whiteis.com/similarities-engine
Yeah yeah it was a software patent. If that bugs you, you can take solace in the fact that I blew it executing on monetizing it. Microsoft ended up owning it and I went on to other adventures.
Here’s a list of the 456 US Patents that cite the Similarities Engine patent as prior art: https://www.whiteis.com/cites-to-se-patent
I guess I'm gonna pop in here and mention libre.fm
https://libre.fm/ scrobbling since 2009 built on GNU FM
The SongMeanings.com discussion boards on each lyrics page are an absolute time capsule.
Google Music killed my used of foobar, scrobbling, soulseek and probably others.
I'm still so mad they killed Google Music. I uploaded ALL my downloaded tracks & ripped music from it, then they shut it down and I lost all of it :(
It wasn't migrated to YouTube Music?
It seems like some of it was, but for full albums of artists they just redirected it to the official artist uploads on YouTube. But, then if those links change it breaks old playlists and I lose track of it.
It was just such a convoluted mess. They promised you could upload all your music and it would be there forever, they said! Bastards...
I stopped scrobbling many years ago when they messed together my top artist at the time (the lovely "alan", spelled with all small letters) with other entirely unrelated artists by the same name (but with different letter case, e.g. some "Alan" this, and some "Alan" that.) It didn't represent at all what I was actually listening to, so what was the point?
It has always been like this. It's a super simple system. All artists are only identified by their name. So there are a ton of artist pages out there that actually have to represent multiple artists with the same name. It's kinda silly, but oh well.
Used their API to pull tag data as part of a project not too long ago and had to spend a disappointing amount of time filtering out literal hate tags/slurs and widespread deliberate mistagging.
It caused me to not make the code public until I can ship it with an allowlist. It's almost done but I got distracted