Still use last.fm. Most "You might like this" algorithms go straight for the low-hanging fruit, and often fail to take any kind of nuance into account.<p>I can't tell you how many of the streaming services will see my Black Sabbath play history and immediately recommend, "If you like Black Sabbath, you should love...Slipknot!" But I've never had a real person make that mistake, because a real person who looks at my last.fm history and has an understanding of the genre says "Gee, this guy has plenty of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and tons of doom metal on his list, but <i>doesn't</i> have Slipknot, Korn, or Pantera in his history. <i>Maybe that's intentional</i>."<p>Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes.
Last.fm died (as in for me personally) when I stopped cultivating my own music library. I used to have gigabytes of MP3s and FLACs, all neatly organised into folders, usually by artist/album, and meticulously maintained ID3 tags. All played through software like Winamp with the audioscrobbler plugin, or iTunes when I had my beloved iPod classic.<p>All of that drifted away as I got older, and the dawn of streaming services like Spotify came onto the scene. I'm not sure where my music is now, probably on a hard drive somewhere, dumped amongst other junk.<p>I think spotify used to come with last.fm support but I think I just lost interest in the whole thing, I don't consume music in the same way as when I was a younger man.<p>EDIT: Just logged into my last.fm account and it looks like the scrobbling still works from spotify, so it's been scrobbling all this time, probably for 10+ years without me logging in!
Contrary to popular belief Last.fm never really died (and I hope it never will), however it lost years ago its most valuable thing: *its own streaming service*.<p>It was just perfect at everything, was it finding new releases, discovery obscure gems, or play your favorite things all over. It was so magical that you could hardly believe it was computer generated.<p>Also, it was a wonderful "sane" social network where music and only music was at its heart: no vanity metrics (eg: counting likes) / vanity egos (eg: influencers) or purely material interests (eg: make money from this or that).<p>Anyway, it's sad it lost the streaming war pretty soon. Maybe it was just too genuine to compete with services driven by dark patterns, suspicious agendas, and mostly, greed.<p>Wait, is this a metaphor of the old internet versus the present state of digital affairs? Or am I just getting nostalgic here?<p>I don't know. Long live Last.fm!<p>111,920 Scrobbles from 9,137 Artists since Jul 2006.
Same as I felt eleven years ago. Last.fm is the rare site that I don't mind to harvest my personal data, because musical taste analytics are fun.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2775330" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2775330</a><p>I enjoy using it as a statistics aggregator as well. Last.fm definitely gets credit for capturing the primal sense of achievement with scrobbling. People I know don't really use it as a social network other than friending each other, but even that is sufficient because it allows you to peek into their current musical tastes. It's sort of elegant how Last.fm's experience is pretty much just collecting data and displaying it nicely; no need for apps, uploading user content, or location-based gimmicks. Just listening to your music library is generating content enough.
With the onset of chronic decision fatigue, I no longer can enjoy the selection of music from my personal curation of mp3s I have stashed away over the past 25 or so years.<p>Knowing that I generally like the music I have, I have found some huge success with a simple change: I do not in any way allow myself to influence what music is playing.<p>It's very easy to do. The first version of this was done in my woodshop, because it's creepy back there: a cheap amp with a 64 gig SD card plays the first 64 gig of my music on a loop. I believe it's about a 3 week loop. Whenever I go out there to get a screw driver or drop of a bucket of old paint, there is some OC Remix collection of Legend of Zelda, or some Cowboy Bebop, or their ilk, playing at a reasonable volume. It keeps ghosts out and really increases my pleasure of being out there - just enough distraction to be able to think.<p>Version two is my now permanent work-from-home office. I have been exploring these Raspberry Pi audio distributions. Volumio, and now a fork of rune audio called rAudio-1. At first I was allowing myself to fall back into the same trap: selecting a folder on a NAS share of the music, but then I rediscovered Web Radio. I left it on a classical music station for a little over 4 weeks, just soft piano music at about 40 dB, barely detectable. My work microphone can't (or wont) pick it up so I let it play right through meetings.<p>It took me that four months to realize I could install my own web radio station of my own music. With icecast2 and mpd running on an underused virtual machine, I can leave it playing all of my music on a single stream available to only my rAudio-1. Coupled with a 60 dollar add-on DAC to (significantly) clean up the audio quality, and a 30 dollar amplifier that has only a volume knob, my situation is now perfect: I can either listen to what is playing, or I can not. If I don't like what is playing, then I either listen to it anyways, or try later. I'm listening to music 40 hours a week again, and am better for it.
I discovered so much music through last.fm back in the day. There were so many obscure and weird bands to find in their «Related artists» and whole genres I feel I’d never have heard of if not for last.fm
I used to be obsessed with Last fm when I was a teenager and was similarly obsessed with music in general. I think I moved away from it probably before my interest in music waned, if I remember right it was because something about the whole “quantify self” movement became off-putting to me. There was something weird about looking at the charts and who your top artists were the same kind of way having a top 8 friends on MySpace was a bit weird - I didn’t need or want to have these things explicitly ranked. I didn’t want to log on to Last Fm and view bands I’d been listening to like they were a sports league table.<p>It just wasn’t for me in the end but I can see how it’s appealing for other people. For me it will always be a nice little reminder of the mid 00s along with stuff like indie music and the mighty boosh.
Last.fm has a special place in my life since I actually met someone I was quite fond of through the site. I kept seeing her profile pop up as someone with similar musical tastes. I noticed we lived in the same city so I sent her a message. We corresponded back and forth for awhile, eventually met and then dated for a few months.
Last.fm (and the sadly defunct what.cd) have shaped my taste in music beyond what I could ever imagine: I have discovered a massive amount of amazing musicians through these recommendations; something I feel Spotify has never really been able to achieve, even after a decade+ of use.<p>Scrobbling has almost become a religion to me, to the point I found solutions to scrobble my Vinyl listening and consider scrobbling capability in a player as a make-or-break feature !
I love Last.fm!<p>As a small side project I made a CLI tool in Python [1] to retrieve music collages from tapmusic.net [2] (uses your Last.fm scrobbles to create collages of your most listened to music).<p>Check them out if you have a second!<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/atomheartbrother/tapmusic-cli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/atomheartbrother/tapmusic-cli</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://tapmusic.net/" rel="nofollow">https://tapmusic.net/</a>
Last.fm was fantastic when it first came out, it was one of the few instances where I felt that I actually 'owned' the data I was sending to it. I discovered many new artists through it.<p>I think its decline will probably correlate with people's transition from MP3s to streaming services. It was pretty sad when that breach happened, as that felt like a nail in the coffin.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/43-million-passwords-hacked-in-last-fm-breach/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/43-million-passwords-hacke...</a><p>That said, I do occasionally stumble upon Last FM in search results and it's slightly surprising and slightly pleasant to still see it around.<p>The 'burgeoning' Discord presence (400,000 total users) doesn't feel like a lot however, it still feels like a niche interest group.
According to my profile I'm scrobbling since 7 Aug 2007. I'm even paying for the "Pro" version just to support the site (and for the feature that allowed me to change my emberassing old user name).<p>I don't check it very often any more but for some reason I still like to look at the graphs from time to time, even if I don't really hunt down recommendations based on that.
Last.fm probably changed hands a few times, yet, to me it is an example of how you don't need to keep shoving features into a product/service to be happy with it.<p>Contrast thia the regular complains around products like pinboard/evernote. Pinboard gets flack for not changing, and evernote for chasing people with useless features.
230k scrobbles since 2006.<p>I love last.fm, it still has the vibe of the healthy internet. It is cool to dig into my listening history. Last fm suggestions and recs are still the best. The wikis are great for fans.<p>I miss the times where i was finding friends by shouting to strangers profiles. Just in the love of music.<p>Long live last.fm!!
I've been using Last.fm for ~15 years now. I love to see my stats -even if I don't listen to music as much as I did when I was a teenager-. In the process of keeping my profile accurate I developed an open source tool (Open Scrobbler[1]) which ended up being used by thousands of users. Even now that last.fm is not as active as it was 10 years ago, the project is self-sufficient through its Patreon. I've also used it as talking point on job interviews as well. I'm very grateful for all the experiences and people I met thanks to last.fm!<p>[1]: <a href="https://openscrobbler.com/" rel="nofollow">https://openscrobbler.com/</a>
One of the first "Web 2.0" apps I remember using next to Gmail; it was called Audioscrobbler back then. I used the scrobble feature religiously to log my listening habits from 2005-2012.<p>While Last.fm failed to capitalize on early innovations like the social media features and algorithmic online radio, the "scrobble" feature oddly enough stood the test of time. Even though it was the pre-smartphone age, developers built unofficial applications to let you log your listens from almost anywhere: iPod/iTunes, Windows Media Center-compatible MP3 players, and eventually any audio player that ran the hacked Rockbox OS, including the iPod 5G.
Scrobbling is fun, just one of those 'personal data' things to look at from time to time. Last.fm was always corporate/sketchy tho and never got into it/didn't want an account on it.<p>GNU Libre.fm worked fine for years tho! Nice to have an archive of data just sitting on there. (Lack of hands to work on it to get other features like dumps and more analysis never panned out tho).<p>But since the pandemic my listening habits on mobile where most of the scrobbling was being done from have changed completely and there's limited support on windows / no long available in things like WinAmp etc, so it's just not a thing anymore. Kinda sad.
This has taken me back. I used to have last.fm on all day when I was working at home. I moved to Spotify in 2014 (it turns out). I moved my loved tracks into a playlist (in 2014) and a 4500 song playlist somehow. Looking through the tracks most of the artists haven't released anything in the last few years. So its like a time caught in a bottle. Getting quite nostalgic listening through.<p>Last.fm was great - I wish I could work out why I left.
I remember being at University with one of the founders (maybe late founder?).<p>I recall him working on audioscrobbler as a 3rd year project, and was quite impressed with it, mostly by the fact that it actually worked and recommended me something I liked.<p>It maybe started as a plugin for one of the popular audio players at the time (name completely escapes me though).<p>Only other thing I remember was him being super passionate about it, and wanting to carry on development after uni.
I'm a bit late to the party, but if you're using linux, I wrote a small user daemon called mpris-scrobbler that can submit music to last.fm (and other similar websites) for any player without requiring any plugins.<p>The project has been packaged for a couple of distributions but you can also find it on github.
Last.fm was maybe the only music player that had a genuine social component - you were actually motivated to follow people there, unlike Spotify or anything else. Glad to see they are still around but sad at the same time they were not able to make a mega commercial success. Hope their time will come
Love the service. Been using it for most of its life cycle and pay for the Pro service when I can. I don’t really utilize the features but like to support services I find useful.<p>It’s no Rdio [RIP :(] but the recommendations from LastFM are probably the best I’ve encountered.
I used to track my scrobble since 2007, but around 2016 i got my account banned, no explanation, tried to contact support and no luck. My profile is deleted now, i never bothered to create a new account, i was mainly interested on looking at my old data.
When I come across mentions of new artists, I use last.fm to quickly find out which is the most popular song by that artist, on the assumption that listening to that song will give me the best indication of whether I might like them.
Been scrobbling nonstop since 2006. Discovered last.fm while digging through Amarok's settings.<p>So many memories, discovered genres, met friends, found a subculture where I belong (more like the subculture found me with the neighbor system)
Nice to see last.fm on the front page, it brings back fun memories when we were mocking each other about leaving the player playing all night just to get the stats up.<p>Shameless plug: I'm a firm believer that human recommendations are superior, which is one of the reasons I'm creating <a href="https://digs.fm" rel="nofollow">https://digs.fm</a>, something like Goodreads but for music[1].<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862</a>
last.fm was the first internet service I've ever paid for. It was good value and incredibly awesome to discover new music. Then in 2010 they removed the full track streaming [0] and that killed the site for me. Scrobbling stats are nice, but for me the discovery mode was the best.<p>0, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150227221251/http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/617074" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150227221251/http://www.last.f...</a>
As someone who likes a lot of music that isn't exactly mainstream and not popular at all in social circle, that site was a one of the best things I ever found on the Internet.<p>Happy Birthday!
I love last.fm, always have been. Started out using the winamp plugin in 2007. I even synced my ipod regularly through itunes & the scrobbler to get stats.
I used it for a while. The recommendation engine needed work, and I felt the social aspect of the whole thing was influencing the music I was listening to.<p>These days, I would go as far as to claim that I grew to despise the figure of the music nerd. I never visit websites such as last.fm and RYM, and the mere sight of a copy of "In the Court of the Crimson King" is enough to ruin my day.<p>It's hard to explain.
The best streaming app I've ever used was last.fm for the xbox. It required so little attention to get music (and comedy) that I liked instead of constantly being either bored by repetitive selections or needing to skip tracks frequently. Think it got axed when Microsoft decided to create their own streaming service, which didn't measure up to what the last.fm app had.
Still use Last.fm. Great service and a nice API to boot if you're wanting to make anything music-y. Integrates nicely into Spotify for playback statistics.<p>Shame it's pretty much on life-support now and any new features seem to behind a paywall.
I still use last.fm. While I don't find use it's suggestion algorithms or radio function, I think it's amazing to look back at a particular time in my life and see what I was listening too. Or to show people via my profile what kind of music I like.<p>The only thing I'd wish it'd do is update my play counts from my Sony Walkman NWA.
If you like Last.fm (as a user since 2007, I love it), this app for Apple Music is an amazing (unofficial) front-end for it: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id1469948986" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id...</a>
Big fan of last.fm and have used it when compiling my "year in review" posts.<p>It's a great service and, as others have mentioned, it really does a great job of finding obscure and relevant suggestions on underground metal bands that I enjoy.<p>It's particularly good at high quality, relevant recommendations for new bands with little following.
I've always seen last.fm but never actually decided to try it until today. I wish I used it back then. I agree with others here that the big streaming services generally suck at finding me new music based on songs I like (but are very good at recommending songs I've listened to hundreds of times)
I can't remember the last time I used Last.fm. It's been at least fifteen years. I certainly created my account a long time ago, probably not long after its inception. Just logged on and my account still exists, but now it requires you to connect to a Spotify account to play music.
I always thought about last.fm as a home for my music collection and recommendation engine outside of music distribution itself. That is until i tried downloading my last.fm data and dealing with viacom legal for 6 months. Not really owning my listening data makes this whole idea absurd.
I still remember when Last.fm was the best wall to see the concert posters of small to medium-sized bands (my taste, metal). You just had to filter by city and you found a great night.<p>And of course, discovering music similar to your musical taste, that really helped me to discover new bands.
If you just like the listening statistics part of lastfm, Maloja is a nice looking self-hostable alternative: <a href="https://github.com/krateng/maloja" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/krateng/maloja</a>
I typically check in on my last.fm scrobble history every 6 months or so... and I just checked in and found that spotify has stopped working. This is truly a disaster for me and my heart is broken.<p>Does Spotify to Last.fm still work for anyone?
I made a website to create a collage from your lastfm albums: <a href="https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/</a>
Great time to reinstall the plugin that lets my media player scrobble to last.fm ;)<p>A bit of a shame that MyMedia for Alexa (local music streaming for Alexa) doesn’t support it, but at least that’s only for the kitchen anyway.
uhm so i dont know if I'm having Mandela moment or Senior moment but I distinctly remember last.fm sending me an email telling me they were completely shutting down and i remember having to close my account and all my carefully curated stuff just disappeared into nothing.<p>the old service was really cool but it stopped. i have no idea wtf people are talking about when they say its '20 years old'. it literally ceased to exist.<p>i realize it may have been replaced with something else, but that something else bears almost no resemblance to what it was.<p>please help - a confused old man
I don't understand why Spotify or some music streaming service doesn't buy Last.fm already.<p>It's a pretty useful service that nobody is going to pay for unless it comes included in a streaming service already.
So uh, when did Neil Young actually leave Spotify?<p>At least within Canada, Neil Young's music has always been available on Spotify even during the period when he was feuding with the service about Joe Rogan.<p>Or was just within the US?
All these music services today suck compared to last.fm.<p>I’ve got like 30k songs played and discovered on last.fm and I stopped using it when they ended the service as it used to be years ago.
I still like last.fm for listening history.
I have it connected to CMUS, I tried to also make it work with youtube with an extensions but it didn't work very well.
Last.fm was cool and had huge community but cbs bought it and rewrote it making it slower, clunkier and removing features, essentially destroying it.<p>Back in the day practically all players (including spotify) had scrobbling support.