Last.FM could have been great. Back in 2005 (17 years ago!!) it had a veritable encyclopedia of artists, albums and tracks, a decent recommendations system, "ne

Last.FM could have been great. Back in 2005 (17 years ago!!) it had a veritable encyclopedia of artists, albums and tracks, a decent recommendations system, "neighborhoods" that matched you with other users who listened to similar artists (and they even told you what you had in common so you other ignore users whose 12 year old also likes the Barbie song). You could add specific users to a 'Friends' section. You could look at their music libraries. Last.FM invented scrobbling (AFAIK)... Once upon a time my wife and I both paid them a monthly subscription for ad-free music. You couldn't play whatever you liked, because of the licensing model - instead you could pick a "radio station" based on your neighborhood, a specific neighbor, your likes, a band, a genre or even your whole library (ie: everything you ever listened to). It was really great for discovering new music, had a great interface, and had built-in love/ban buttons. Right when the world was about to lose its shit over the inferior Spotify, Last.FM absolutely fucked up. Instead of running a stable infrastructure and licensing music for on-demand streaming like Spotify did, they mismanaged their infrastructure, making music borderline unplayable. They had site outages. They broke their API with backward-incompatible changes. Once they proved beyond doubt that they couldn't run the streaming infrastructure, they gave up trying simply added a Spotify play button. And there went the only reason to give Last.FM your money, because now you had to pay Spotify anyway. Pathetic. A wasted opportunity. If I could have the Last.FM from a decade and a half ago with on-demand music and stable infrastructure I'd take it over any other service available right now.