14 ms·

Last.fm turns 20

350 points by embit 4y ago

politelemon 4y ago
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. 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. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/43-million-passwords-hacked-in-last-fm-breach/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/43-million-passwords-hacke... 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. The 'burgeoning' Discord presence (400,000 total users) doesn't feel like a lot however, it still feels like a niche interest group.
- moolcool 4y ago
  Last.fm is still fantastic! Spotify natively supports it, and I've never stopped scrobbling.
benbristow 4y ago
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. Shame it's pretty much on life-support now and any new features seem to behind a paywall.
- 4oo4 4y ago
  The API is nice as an end user and it's super easy to integrate it with lots of things, but working with it as a developer not so much. The latest version is pretty RESTful, but the previous API versions that lots of things still use (since it sounds like Last.fm will allow you to keep using it forever even though it's deprecated) are pretty painful. However, one pain point with all versions of the API is lack of full HTTPS. I've always been really confused why I'd still see HTTP traffic to the Scrobbling API despite giving it an HTTPS scrobbling URL, and what I found is that you authenticate over HTTPS to get a token, but then the API returns a submission URL that's always plaintext HTTP. I believe you can still send it over HTTPS by rewriting the URL, and I know that this API was designed before the ubiquity of HTTPS, but it's absurd to keep doing this HTTPS --> HTTP redirect in 2022. Even 3rd party scrobbling services like libre.fm copy this behavior. When API docs give you a primary endpoint of a plantext HTTP URL, that's a huge red flag. https://www.last.fm/api/intro https://www.last.fm/api/intro However, I do still love last.fm and still try to obsessively scrobble everything I'm listening to since I've discovered a lot of my favorite bands that way, and it's a great way to get recommendations of live music if you're ever traveling somewhere. I think the paywall has been there for a while, but I'm definitely guilty of not supporting it enough despite how much value I've gotten from it over the years.
unvs 4y ago
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
- Oxidation 4y ago
  Their recommendations that I got then seem leagues better than what the big modern streamers give now. For all their AI and ginourmous models, they mostly seem to be stuck on "what you listened to yesterday".
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    I always felt like the Spotify recommendations were cheap knockoffs. Its clear Spotify either earns more money from those plays, or the artists have gamed the system. Edit: by cheap knockoffs I literally mean artists who look and sound like the original. Eminem knockoffs come to mind as particularly striking.
  - conradfr 4y ago
    Google Play Music was pretty good, especially the auto-generated playlists (albeit a bit repetitive after a while), made me discover a lot of artists, so of course Google had to kill it. Nowadays I use Deezer and it's definitively worse.
  - pmlnr 4y ago
    I keep pointing this out and it seems like nobody believes me. I miss the last.fm radio so much!
- nemo44x 4y ago
  It’s funny because you learn your unique music tastes are actually common enough that a genre emerges where things you’ll like will be recommended. It’s nice to fill gaps or deep cuts in a more obscure style you like.
hunglee2 4y ago
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
sandrob57 4y ago
I hope Last.FM never goes away; I've been tracking my scrobbles since 2005
- dividefuel 4y ago
  Me too! 480,000 scrobbles and still going. I recently downloaded all of my scrobbles so that at least I'd have the listening data in case the service ever goes down.
  - carl_dr 4y ago
    I did the same recently after seeing it was possible. 150,000 scrobbles for me, which I thought was a lot until I saw your count! https://www.last.fm/user/carldr https://www.last.fm/user/carldr
    - mattl 4y ago
      I've seen users with 1.7 million scrobbles on Libre.fm (which means they imported their scrobble history)
    - punchclockhero 4y ago
      Aw shucks,low compatibility. https://www.last.fm/user/unspotted https://www.last.fm/user/unspotted
      - carl_dr 4y ago
        Late 90s me would have had a higher compatibility with you, there are a few blasts from my past in your scrobbles. Followed!
      - dpcx 4y ago
        Only 72k for me, but there was a time for several years where I wasn't listening to any music on my computer. Something that working from home has seriously changed :D
      - xn 4y ago
n2j3 4y ago
Lastcord (last.fm on discord) is the place to be if you miss last.fm groups
lzooz 4y ago
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. Back in the day practically all players (including spotify) had scrobbling support.
- moolcool 4y ago
  Spotify is still scrobbling!
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Anyone found a better scrobbling service? Preferably that one can self host?
  - warp 4y ago
    https://listenbrainz.org/ https://listenbrainz.org/ is open source (from the MusicBrainz ppl), though not really intended for self-hosting.
    - dairylee 4y ago
      You can import your Last.fm history over to ListenBrainz too. Most of the 'scrobbling' apps will work with ListenBrainz also.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I believe FunkWhale is attempting something along these lines: https://fediverse.party/en/funkwhale/ https://fediverse.party/en/funkwhale/
  - haroldp 4y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/eo77m1/is_there_a_self_hosted_lastfm_alternative/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/eo77m1/is_there...
- adityeah 4y ago
  I had even managed scrobbling from the iPod classic. There used to be a windows app that would keep track of all the music listened to since <last scrobble> and would scrobble the bulk, in batches.
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
I'm curious how easy it would be to make a pure scrobbling service competitor to last.fm.
- charlieegan3 4y ago
  I have thought about this before too. last.fm is well supported by services and players. It’s often the only option when there’s no API to access now playing on the device.
rcarr 4y ago
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. 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.
- rx_tx 4y ago
  And yet, the "music stats" thing still has some appeal to some, when a lot of people I know post their Spotify "year in review" at the end of the year on IG stories.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  It's funny how HN was really big into self-quantification during the early 2010s, I remember how there were several popular posts of people who built dashboards to log their own personal metrics. Actually I think that's still a trend that persists.
  - djkoolaide 4y ago
    It definitely persists, it's just that now our Apple Watch does it without needing to build the dashboard ourselves :)
calvinmorrison 4y ago
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. Does Spotify to Last.fm still work for anyone?
- arthurmorgan 4y ago
  Try removing and re-adding the connection. This occasionally happens to me too.
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    Well, I am glad it's working again... whew
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
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. 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 doesn't have Slipknot, Korn, or Pantera in his history. Maybe that's intentional." Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes.
- powersnail 4y ago
  Reminds me of the old facebook joke: We went to the same high school, we have over 100 common connections, you have recommended him to me 10 times already, and we are still not friends. Get a clue, Facebook!
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  I've found most recommendation systems in general don't grasp the distinctions in genre that are in metal, or the stylistic differences. Most stuff is just tagged "METAL", when there is a huge difference between grind, funeral doom, or atmo-black. Even within a genre there can be differences it doesn't really capture, like tech-death: you might call Beyond Creation and Warp Chamber both tech-death, but in reality they are pretty far from each other even though they are both technical in a tech-deathy way.
  - CrypticShift 4y ago
    It depends on how the recommendation system defines its music genres. Spotify uses audio spectral features to automatically delineate tracks into styles. Last.fm and RateYourMusic (who added recommendations recently) rely on human taggers. So, they may give you better results genre-wise.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    How do you find the https://everynoise.com/ https://everynoise.com/ categories to fare at this?
haunter 4y ago
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. 0, https://web.archive.org/web/20150227221251/http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/617074 https://web.archive.org/web/20150227221251/http://www.last.f...
disposition2 4y ago
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. It’s no Rdio [RIP :(] but the recommendations from LastFM are probably the best I’ve encountered.
nvr219 4y ago
I've been using last.fm every day for a little under 20 years - via scrobbler. I visit the site itself maybe 1-2 times a year.
jl6 4y ago
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.
wantlotsofcurry 4y ago
I love Last.fm! 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). Check them out if you have a second! [1]: https://github.com/atomheartbrother/tapmusic-cli https://github.com/atomheartbrother/tapmusic-cli [2]: https://tapmusic.net/ https://tapmusic.net/
- asenchi 4y ago
  I still use this website to produce collages. Thank you! :)
beardyw 4y ago
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. Last.fm was great - I wish I could work out why I left.
- Euphorbium 4y ago
  They had a huge redesign, which removed almost all social features, and those features did not return for years. That is when everybody left. The fuck up was bigger than current twitter fuckup. I was hooked on the service from the start, even was a paying customer until they stopped supporting my country, but eventually they became straight up user hostile.
Apocryphon 4y ago
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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2775330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2775330 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.
nathias 4y 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.
randomsofr 4y ago
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.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
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.
thebrain 4y ago
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.
corobo 4y ago
Hah, I'm still scrobbling. Fair play to Spotify keeping that going. Scrobbling since 31 Mar 2006, wow that's fair few music phases. 18-34.
eric8bits 4y ago
Still love it to this day. I have Roon and TIDAL connected for automatic scrobbling.
lolive 4y ago
Wake me up when spotifynewmusic.com is resurrected. [the only music discovery service that really made me discover uncanny things]
nunez 4y ago
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)
lolive 4y ago
How can I listen to Last.fm recommendations on my smartphone? Their app is no longer in the App Store in Europe.
jollyllama 4y ago
Ah yes, that thing that has a symbol in every media player ever that I never use. Not knocking it, I've just never used it.
djhworld 4y ago
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. 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. 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. 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!
- fetzu 4y ago
  Consider yourself lucky, Spotify scrobbling used to break for me almost weekly a few years back (but it has gotten way better, rarely an issue these days) !
- kome 4y ago
  that's a funny edit. are you surprised by your last.fm statistics? will you delete the account?
- ehsankia 4y ago
  I only ever used Last.FM for stats/tracking purposes, and it still does that great across platforms. I have an android app which reports music from any media app I use, and similarly have a chrome extension for desktop. I still find it incredibly valuable, knowing what I listened when, get breakdowns and so on. How else could I tell which were my top 5 favorite artists in 2013?
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  I'm the opposite! I've used Spotify (and other streaming apps) for years. I finally got tired that there was no streaming app that: * Worked well with Sonos * Provided high quality music * Had good automatic caching of music *note below* I tried Spotify, TIDAL, and Apple Music before giving up and putting my library on Plex + Plexamp. *note*: Why is Spotify SO BAD when it comes to caching. It's so strange. There are so many situtations where it doesn't work, but it should. I have the entire contents of an album (but not the album itself) on playlist. The playlist is downloaded offline. Spotify doesn't let me search or play the songs in the album unless I navigate to the playlist. If I just played a song on data, and I lose my connection and try to re-play it, Spotify won't let me! Does it really not maintain a cache of songs that I played three minutes ago? Search becomes entirely useless when you're transitioning from WiFi to mobile data. This happened to me _every_ _single_ _time_ that I would get into my car and start music before driving. Spotify would refuse to let me do anything until I disabled WiFi. Spotify has to be one of the worst widely used applications.
dewey 4y ago
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). 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.
- lostgame 4y ago
  >> (and for the feature that allowed me to change my emberassing old user name) Still brutally pissed that after more than 10 years with the same account, and even with Premium, Reddit wont let me change my old short name, which is related to my deadname as a trans person. Of course; support requests have been completely ignored.
  - dewey 4y ago
    It took Last.fm a very long time (I believe it is only possible for a couple of years now). That's probably related to the code powering the whole site. I heard some horror stories over the years from people who worked there early on.
nlnn 4y ago
I remember being at University with one of the founders (maybe late founder?). 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. It maybe started as a plugin for one of the popular audio players at the time (name completely escapes me though). Only other thing I remember was him being super passionate about it, and wanting to carry on development after uni.
mradek 4y ago
All these music services today suck compared to last.fm. 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.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
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. 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). 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.
- mattl 4y ago
  I put the brakes on Libre.fm a little to avoid becoming a social silo. What’s there works and people keep using it. GNU social was a spin off, later merging with StatusNet and later Mastodon was a rewrite of GNU social in Rails.
  - chunk_waffle 4y ago
    Is libre.fm still stuck on PHP 5 or are the docs just out dated? https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/librefm.git/tree/gnufm_install.txt https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/librefm.git/tree/gnufm_ins...
    - mattl 4y ago
      Nah it’s on PHP 7.x those are just very old docs. I’m no longer involved with the GNU project so the site is in a weird state where the GNU docs are stuck in time. I do need to do a better job of pointing people to what’s out there though. I am considering a rewrite in modern PHP.
      - mattl 4y ago
        http://fedi.network http://fedi.network — rewrite is happening
- lucifer13 4y ago
res0nat0r 4y ago
118,359 scrobbles since Feb 2006 and still going strong. Love sending all my listens to last.fm.
digitalsushi 4y ago
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
punchclockhero 4y ago
Been scrobbling nonstop since 2006. Discovered last.fm while digging through Amarok's settings. So many memories, discovered genres, met friends, found a subculture where I belong (more like the subculture found me with the neighbor system)
gtirloni 4y ago
I don't understand why Spotify or some music streaming service doesn't buy Last.fm already. It's a pretty useful service that nobody is going to pay for unless it comes included in a streaming service already.
- toofy 4y ago
  i genuinely hope they dont. if spotify bought it, they would almost certainly kill off scrobbles from outside music sources. of course they would promise this wouldn't happen, but we all know from repeated experience, over time the api would slowly be closed off.
  - ruuda 4y ago
    https://listenbrainz.org/ https://listenbrainz.org/ exists, it can import your Last.fm history, and it is backed by the same foundation that builds MusicBrainz.
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  Because they don't need to: They chose machine intelligence (= The Echo Nest, ) over unreliable Human tagging (= Last.fm) Also, Spotify now has the data of more than 400 million active listeners. Last.fm has at best 20 millions of users (including a lot of inactive one).
throwaway874839 4y ago
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. Shameless plug: I'm a firm believer that human recommendations are superior, which is one of the reasons I'm creating https://digs.fm https://digs.fm, something like Goodreads but for music[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
tdjsnelling 4y ago
One of the few subscription services I would happily pay more for, for the recommendations alone.
achairapart 4y ago
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*. 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. 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). 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. Wait, is this a metaphor of the old internet versus the present state of digital affairs? Or am I just getting nostalgic here? I don't know. Long live Last.fm! 111,920 Scrobbles from 9,137 Artists since Jul 2006.
- fatneckbeardz 4y ago
  thank you, i thought i had lost my damn mind. i was like wtf are people talking about 20 years old. it shut down and i lost all my stuff , years and years ago. i dont know what it is anymore but its like last.fm in name only
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  > it's sad it lost the streaming war pretty soon. There is a place for both: Streaming services and DB/SN sites. they don't have to be the same. I even hope for more segmentation (and interoperability) in the future: Companies that only provide the raw music. Others that build the UI/UX (players...) and still others that provides additional services (Social networking, Data related...) Last.fm lost not because it is too genuine (CBS is one of the largest media conglomerates) but because it got lazy and failed to leverage its data to create more value. The truth is people are just as Lazy when it comes to music (organize, discover…), _so I wonder how much you can really grow in this space.
fetzu 4y ago
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. 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 !
- kirenida 4y ago
  I wanted to write exactly the same things you wrote, except I have only been on Spotify for 3 years now. I assume you use the Discogs app for scrobbling your vinyl? I was really pleasantly surprised when I found that feature :)
  - fetzu 4y ago
    Sorry for replying this late ! I actually didn’t know the Discogs app supported scrobbling, I currently use an open source app called “Finale”[1] that does the job pretty well. As soon as I can get my hands on a RaspberryPi, I have plans to make the whole process automatic. [1] https://github.com/nrubin29/finale https://github.com/nrubin29/finale
  - zimmund 4y ago
    You can also use Open Scrobbler[1] for your vinyls! [1]: https://openscrobbler.com/ https://openscrobbler.com/
bentt 4y ago
I still don't understand what scrobbling is
- cycrutchfield 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/ZR8az1UMOiQ https://youtu.be/ZR8az1UMOiQ
bromuro 4y ago
230k scrobbles since 2006. 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. I miss the times where i was finding friends by shouting to strangers profiles. Just in the love of music. Long live last.fm!!
krylon 4y ago
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. Happy Birthday!
JadoJodo 4y ago
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: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id1469948986 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id...
jFriedensreich 4y ago
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.
cypherpunks01 4y ago
Brings me back. Who else was on OiNK and what.cd back in the day?
- paulirish 4y ago
  _o/
627467 4y ago
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. Contrast thia the regular complains around products like pinboard/evernote. Pinboard gets flack for not changing, and evernote for chasing people with useless features.
mdtrooper 4y ago
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. And of course, discovering music similar to your musical taste, that really helped me to discover new bands.
racl101 4y ago
So uh, when did Neil Young actually leave Spotify? 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. Or was just within the US?
scelerat 4y ago
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.
fatneckbeardz 4y ago
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. 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. i realize it may have been replaced with something else, but that something else bears almost no resemblance to what it was. please help - a confused old man
monowii 4y ago
If you just like the listening statistics part of lastfm, Maloja is a nice looking self-hostable alternative: https://github.com/krateng/maloja https://github.com/krateng/maloja
rchaud 4y ago
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. 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.
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  > failed to capitalize on early innovations. CBS really screwed this up. To their credit they kept the API alive, so other could somehow innovate with the data.
karlgrz 4y ago
Big fan of last.fm and have used it when compiling my "year in review" posts. 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. It's particularly good at high quality, relevant recommendations for new bands with little following.
Semaphor 4y ago
Great time to reinstall the plugin that lets my media player scrobble to last.fm ;) 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.
flerp 4y ago
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.
happyjack 4y ago
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. The only thing I'd wish it'd do is update my play counts from my Sony Walkman NWA.
JacksonGariety 4y ago
I made a website to create a collage from your lastfm albums: https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/ https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/
TurboHaskal 4y ago
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. 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. It's hard to explain.
mariusor 4y ago
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. The project has been packaged for a couple of distributions but you can also find it on github.
zimmund 4y ago
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! [1]: https://openscrobbler.com/ https://openscrobbler.com/

350 points by embit 4y ago

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. 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. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/43-million-passwords-hacked-in-last-fm-breach/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/43-million-passwords-hacke... 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. The 'burgeoning' Discord presence (400,000 total users) doesn't feel like a lot however, it still feels like a niche interest group.

moolcool 4y ago
Last.fm is still fantastic! Spotify natively supports it, and I've never stopped scrobbling.

benbristow 4y ago

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. Shame it's pretty much on life-support now and any new features seem to behind a paywall.

4oo4 4y ago
The API is nice as an end user and it's super easy to integrate it with lots of things, but working with it as a developer not so much. The latest version is pretty RESTful, but the previous API versions that lots of things still use (since it sounds like Last.fm will allow you to keep using it forever even though it's deprecated) are pretty painful. However, one pain point with all versions of the API is lack of full HTTPS. I've always been really confused why I'd still see HTTP traffic to the Scrobbling API despite giving it an HTTPS scrobbling URL, and what I found is that you authenticate over HTTPS to get a token, but then the API returns a submission URL that's always plaintext HTTP. I believe you can still send it over HTTPS by rewriting the URL, and I know that this API was designed before the ubiquity of HTTPS, but it's absurd to keep doing this HTTPS --> HTTP redirect in 2022. Even 3rd party scrobbling services like libre.fm copy this behavior. When API docs give you a primary endpoint of a plantext HTTP URL, that's a huge red flag. https://www.last.fm/api/intro https://www.last.fm/api/intro However, I do still love last.fm and still try to obsessively scrobble everything I'm listening to since I've discovered a lot of my favorite bands that way, and it's a great way to get recommendations of live music if you're ever traveling somewhere. I think the paywall has been there for a while, but I'm definitely guilty of not supporting it enough despite how much value I've gotten from it over the years.

unvs 4y ago

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

Oxidation 4y ago
Their recommendations that I got then seem leagues better than what the big modern streamers give now. For all their AI and ginourmous models, they mostly seem to be stuck on "what you listened to yesterday".
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I always felt like the Spotify recommendations were cheap knockoffs. Its clear Spotify either earns more money from those plays, or the artists have gamed the system. Edit: by cheap knockoffs I literally mean artists who look and sound like the original. Eminem knockoffs come to mind as particularly striking.
- conradfr 4y ago
  Google Play Music was pretty good, especially the auto-generated playlists (albeit a bit repetitive after a while), made me discover a lot of artists, so of course Google had to kill it. Nowadays I use Deezer and it's definitively worse.
- pmlnr 4y ago
  I keep pointing this out and it seems like nobody believes me. I miss the last.fm radio so much!
nemo44x 4y ago
It’s funny because you learn your unique music tastes are actually common enough that a genre emerges where things you’ll like will be recommended. It’s nice to fill gaps or deep cuts in a more obscure style you like.

hunglee2 4y ago

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

sandrob57 4y ago

I hope Last.FM never goes away; I've been tracking my scrobbles since 2005

dividefuel 4y ago
Me too! 480,000 scrobbles and still going. I recently downloaded all of my scrobbles so that at least I'd have the listening data in case the service ever goes down.
- carl_dr 4y ago
  I did the same recently after seeing it was possible. 150,000 scrobbles for me, which I thought was a lot until I saw your count! https://www.last.fm/user/carldr https://www.last.fm/user/carldr
  - mattl 4y ago
    I've seen users with 1.7 million scrobbles on Libre.fm (which means they imported their scrobble history)
  - punchclockhero 4y ago
    Aw shucks,low compatibility. https://www.last.fm/user/unspotted https://www.last.fm/user/unspotted
    - carl_dr 4y ago
      Late 90s me would have had a higher compatibility with you, there are a few blasts from my past in your scrobbles. Followed!
    - dpcx 4y ago
      Only 72k for me, but there was a time for several years where I wasn't listening to any music on my computer. Something that working from home has seriously changed :D
    - xn 4y ago

n2j3 4y ago

Lastcord (last.fm on discord) is the place to be if you miss last.fm groups

lzooz 4y ago

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. Back in the day practically all players (including spotify) had scrobbling support.

moolcool 4y ago
Spotify is still scrobbling!
paulryanrogers 4y ago
Anyone found a better scrobbling service? Preferably that one can self host?
- warp 4y ago
  https://listenbrainz.org/ https://listenbrainz.org/ is open source (from the MusicBrainz ppl), though not really intended for self-hosting.
  - dairylee 4y ago
    You can import your Last.fm history over to ListenBrainz too. Most of the 'scrobbling' apps will work with ListenBrainz also.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I believe FunkWhale is attempting something along these lines: https://fediverse.party/en/funkwhale/ https://fediverse.party/en/funkwhale/
- haroldp 4y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/eo77m1/is_there_a_self_hosted_lastfm_alternative/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/eo77m1/is_there...
adityeah 4y ago
I had even managed scrobbling from the iPod classic. There used to be a windows app that would keep track of all the music listened to since <last scrobble> and would scrobble the bulk, in batches.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

I'm curious how easy it would be to make a pure scrobbling service competitor to last.fm.

charlieegan3 4y ago
I have thought about this before too. last.fm is well supported by services and players. It’s often the only option when there’s no API to access now playing on the device.

rcarr 4y ago

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. 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.

rx_tx 4y ago
And yet, the "music stats" thing still has some appeal to some, when a lot of people I know post their Spotify "year in review" at the end of the year on IG stories.
Apocryphon 4y ago
It's funny how HN was really big into self-quantification during the early 2010s, I remember how there were several popular posts of people who built dashboards to log their own personal metrics. Actually I think that's still a trend that persists.
- djkoolaide 4y ago
  It definitely persists, it's just that now our Apple Watch does it without needing to build the dashboard ourselves :)

calvinmorrison 4y ago

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. Does Spotify to Last.fm still work for anyone?

arthurmorgan 4y ago
Try removing and re-adding the connection. This occasionally happens to me too.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Well, I am glad it's working again... whew

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago

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. 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 doesn't have Slipknot, Korn, or Pantera in his history. Maybe that's intentional." Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes.

powersnail 4y ago
Reminds me of the old facebook joke: We went to the same high school, we have over 100 common connections, you have recommended him to me 10 times already, and we are still not friends. Get a clue, Facebook!
beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
I've found most recommendation systems in general don't grasp the distinctions in genre that are in metal, or the stylistic differences. Most stuff is just tagged "METAL", when there is a huge difference between grind, funeral doom, or atmo-black. Even within a genre there can be differences it doesn't really capture, like tech-death: you might call Beyond Creation and Warp Chamber both tech-death, but in reality they are pretty far from each other even though they are both technical in a tech-deathy way.
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  It depends on how the recommendation system defines its music genres. Spotify uses audio spectral features to automatically delineate tracks into styles. Last.fm and RateYourMusic (who added recommendations recently) rely on human taggers. So, they may give you better results genre-wise.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  How do you find the https://everynoise.com/ https://everynoise.com/ categories to fare at this?

haunter 4y ago

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. 0, https://web.archive.org/web/20150227221251/http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/617074 https://web.archive.org/web/20150227221251/http://www.last.f...

disposition2 4y ago

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. It’s no Rdio [RIP :(] but the recommendations from LastFM are probably the best I’ve encountered.

nvr219 4y ago

I've been using last.fm every day for a little under 20 years - via scrobbler. I visit the site itself maybe 1-2 times a year.

jl6 4y ago

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.

wantlotsofcurry 4y ago

I love Last.fm! 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). Check them out if you have a second! [1]: https://github.com/atomheartbrother/tapmusic-cli https://github.com/atomheartbrother/tapmusic-cli [2]: https://tapmusic.net/ https://tapmusic.net/

asenchi 4y ago
I still use this website to produce collages. Thank you! :)

beardyw 4y ago

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. Last.fm was great - I wish I could work out why I left.

Euphorbium 4y ago
They had a huge redesign, which removed almost all social features, and those features did not return for years. That is when everybody left. The fuck up was bigger than current twitter fuckup. I was hooked on the service from the start, even was a paying customer until they stopped supporting my country, but eventually they became straight up user hostile.

Apocryphon 4y ago

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2775330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2775330 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.

nathias 4y 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.

randomsofr 4y ago

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.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

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.

thebrain 4y ago

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.

corobo 4y ago

Hah, I'm still scrobbling. Fair play to Spotify keeping that going. Scrobbling since 31 Mar 2006, wow that's fair few music phases. 18-34.

eric8bits 4y ago

Still love it to this day. I have Roon and TIDAL connected for automatic scrobbling.

lolive 4y ago

Wake me up when spotifynewmusic.com is resurrected. [the only music discovery service that really made me discover uncanny things]

nunez 4y ago

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)

lolive 4y ago

How can I listen to Last.fm recommendations on my smartphone? Their app is no longer in the App Store in Europe.

jollyllama 4y ago

Ah yes, that thing that has a symbol in every media player ever that I never use. Not knocking it, I've just never used it.

djhworld 4y ago

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. 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. 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. 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!

fetzu 4y ago
Consider yourself lucky, Spotify scrobbling used to break for me almost weekly a few years back (but it has gotten way better, rarely an issue these days) !
kome 4y ago
that's a funny edit. are you surprised by your last.fm statistics? will you delete the account?
ehsankia 4y ago
I only ever used Last.FM for stats/tracking purposes, and it still does that great across platforms. I have an android app which reports music from any media app I use, and similarly have a chrome extension for desktop. I still find it incredibly valuable, knowing what I listened when, get breakdowns and so on. How else could I tell which were my top 5 favorite artists in 2013?
shepherdjerred 4y ago
I'm the opposite! I've used Spotify (and other streaming apps) for years. I finally got tired that there was no streaming app that: * Worked well with Sonos * Provided high quality music * Had good automatic caching of music *note below* I tried Spotify, TIDAL, and Apple Music before giving up and putting my library on Plex + Plexamp. *note*: Why is Spotify SO BAD when it comes to caching. It's so strange. There are so many situtations where it doesn't work, but it should. I have the entire contents of an album (but not the album itself) on playlist. The playlist is downloaded offline. Spotify doesn't let me search or play the songs in the album unless I navigate to the playlist. If I just played a song on data, and I lose my connection and try to re-play it, Spotify won't let me! Does it really not maintain a cache of songs that I played three minutes ago? Search becomes entirely useless when you're transitioning from WiFi to mobile data. This happened to me _every_ _single_ _time_ that I would get into my car and start music before driving. Spotify would refuse to let me do anything until I disabled WiFi. Spotify has to be one of the worst widely used applications.

dewey 4y ago

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). 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.

lostgame 4y ago
>> (and for the feature that allowed me to change my emberassing old user name) Still brutally pissed that after more than 10 years with the same account, and even with Premium, Reddit wont let me change my old short name, which is related to my deadname as a trans person. Of course; support requests have been completely ignored.
- dewey 4y ago
  It took Last.fm a very long time (I believe it is only possible for a couple of years now). That's probably related to the code powering the whole site. I heard some horror stories over the years from people who worked there early on.

nlnn 4y ago

I remember being at University with one of the founders (maybe late founder?). 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. It maybe started as a plugin for one of the popular audio players at the time (name completely escapes me though). Only other thing I remember was him being super passionate about it, and wanting to carry on development after uni.

mradek 4y ago

All these music services today suck compared to last.fm. 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.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

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. 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). 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.

mattl 4y ago
I put the brakes on Libre.fm a little to avoid becoming a social silo. What’s there works and people keep using it. GNU social was a spin off, later merging with StatusNet and later Mastodon was a rewrite of GNU social in Rails.
- chunk_waffle 4y ago
  Is libre.fm still stuck on PHP 5 or are the docs just out dated? https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/librefm.git/tree/gnufm_install.txt https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/librefm.git/tree/gnufm_ins...
  - mattl 4y ago
    Nah it’s on PHP 7.x those are just very old docs. I’m no longer involved with the GNU project so the site is in a weird state where the GNU docs are stuck in time. I do need to do a better job of pointing people to what’s out there though. I am considering a rewrite in modern PHP.
    - mattl 4y ago
      http://fedi.network http://fedi.network — rewrite is happening
lucifer13 4y ago

res0nat0r 4y ago

118,359 scrobbles since Feb 2006 and still going strong. Love sending all my listens to last.fm.

digitalsushi 4y ago

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

punchclockhero 4y ago

Been scrobbling nonstop since 2006. Discovered last.fm while digging through Amarok's settings. So many memories, discovered genres, met friends, found a subculture where I belong (more like the subculture found me with the neighbor system)

gtirloni 4y ago

I don't understand why Spotify or some music streaming service doesn't buy Last.fm already. It's a pretty useful service that nobody is going to pay for unless it comes included in a streaming service already.

toofy 4y ago
i genuinely hope they dont. if spotify bought it, they would almost certainly kill off scrobbles from outside music sources. of course they would promise this wouldn't happen, but we all know from repeated experience, over time the api would slowly be closed off.
- ruuda 4y ago
  https://listenbrainz.org/ https://listenbrainz.org/ exists, it can import your Last.fm history, and it is backed by the same foundation that builds MusicBrainz.
CrypticShift 4y ago
Because they don't need to: They chose machine intelligence (= The Echo Nest, ) over unreliable Human tagging (= Last.fm) Also, Spotify now has the data of more than 400 million active listeners. Last.fm has at best 20 millions of users (including a lot of inactive one).

throwaway874839 4y ago

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. Shameless plug: I'm a firm believer that human recommendations are superior, which is one of the reasons I'm creating https://digs.fm https://digs.fm, something like Goodreads but for music[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

tdjsnelling 4y ago

One of the few subscription services I would happily pay more for, for the recommendations alone.

achairapart 4y ago

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*. 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. 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). 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. Wait, is this a metaphor of the old internet versus the present state of digital affairs? Or am I just getting nostalgic here? I don't know. Long live Last.fm! 111,920 Scrobbles from 9,137 Artists since Jul 2006.

fatneckbeardz 4y ago
thank you, i thought i had lost my damn mind. i was like wtf are people talking about 20 years old. it shut down and i lost all my stuff , years and years ago. i dont know what it is anymore but its like last.fm in name only
- deleted 4y ago
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CrypticShift 4y ago
> it's sad it lost the streaming war pretty soon. There is a place for both: Streaming services and DB/SN sites. they don't have to be the same. I even hope for more segmentation (and interoperability) in the future: Companies that only provide the raw music. Others that build the UI/UX (players...) and still others that provides additional services (Social networking, Data related...) Last.fm lost not because it is too genuine (CBS is one of the largest media conglomerates) but because it got lazy and failed to leverage its data to create more value. The truth is people are just as Lazy when it comes to music (organize, discover…), _so I wonder how much you can really grow in this space.

fetzu 4y ago

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. 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 !

kirenida 4y ago
I wanted to write exactly the same things you wrote, except I have only been on Spotify for 3 years now. I assume you use the Discogs app for scrobbling your vinyl? I was really pleasantly surprised when I found that feature :)
- fetzu 4y ago
  Sorry for replying this late ! I actually didn’t know the Discogs app supported scrobbling, I currently use an open source app called “Finale”[1] that does the job pretty well. As soon as I can get my hands on a RaspberryPi, I have plans to make the whole process automatic. [1] https://github.com/nrubin29/finale https://github.com/nrubin29/finale
- zimmund 4y ago
  You can also use Open Scrobbler[1] for your vinyls! [1]: https://openscrobbler.com/ https://openscrobbler.com/

bentt 4y ago

I still don't understand what scrobbling is

cycrutchfield 4y ago
https://youtu.be/ZR8az1UMOiQ https://youtu.be/ZR8az1UMOiQ

bromuro 4y ago

230k scrobbles since 2006. 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. I miss the times where i was finding friends by shouting to strangers profiles. Just in the love of music. Long live last.fm!!

krylon 4y ago

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. Happy Birthday!

JadoJodo 4y ago

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: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id1469948986 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id...

jFriedensreich 4y ago

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.

cypherpunks01 4y ago

Brings me back. Who else was on OiNK and what.cd back in the day?

paulirish 4y ago
_o/

627467 4y ago

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. Contrast thia the regular complains around products like pinboard/evernote. Pinboard gets flack for not changing, and evernote for chasing people with useless features.

mdtrooper 4y ago

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. And of course, discovering music similar to your musical taste, that really helped me to discover new bands.

racl101 4y ago

So uh, when did Neil Young actually leave Spotify? 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. Or was just within the US?

scelerat 4y ago

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.

fatneckbeardz 4y ago

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. 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. i realize it may have been replaced with something else, but that something else bears almost no resemblance to what it was. please help - a confused old man

monowii 4y ago

If you just like the listening statistics part of lastfm, Maloja is a nice looking self-hostable alternative: https://github.com/krateng/maloja https://github.com/krateng/maloja

rchaud 4y ago

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. 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.

CrypticShift 4y ago
> failed to capitalize on early innovations. CBS really screwed this up. To their credit they kept the API alive, so other could somehow innovate with the data.

karlgrz 4y ago

Big fan of last.fm and have used it when compiling my "year in review" posts. 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. It's particularly good at high quality, relevant recommendations for new bands with little following.

Semaphor 4y ago

Great time to reinstall the plugin that lets my media player scrobble to last.fm ;) 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.

flerp 4y ago

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.

happyjack 4y ago

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. The only thing I'd wish it'd do is update my play counts from my Sony Walkman NWA.

JacksonGariety 4y ago

I made a website to create a collage from your lastfm albums: https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/ https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/

TurboHaskal 4y ago

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. 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. It's hard to explain.

mariusor 4y ago

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. The project has been packaged for a couple of distributions but you can also find it on github.

zimmund 4y ago

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! [1]: https://openscrobbler.com/ https://openscrobbler.com/