7 ms·
2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
- majke 11mo agoRichard Jones is still alive and kicking https://x.com/metabrew https://x.com/metabrew
- slater 11mo ago^ protected tweets. But he's also on Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/metabrew.com https://bsky.app/profile/metabrew.com
- w-hn 11mo agoSilly curiosity - what's that "BEAM-appreciator" in that bio? I could only think of a protein brand name (that too not from my geography) shortened as BEAM :/ Anyway I loved that he has reposted a post from musicbraniz https://bsky.app/profile/musicbrainz.org/post/3lnhvp23jc22l/reposted-by https://bsky.app/profile/musicbrainz.org/post/3lnhvp23jc22l/...
- kaizenb 11mo agoStill a member of Last.fm, scrobbling since 4 Jan 2007 with 283,262 scrobbles.
- doublerabbit 11mo agoChecking mine, scrobbling since 9 Oct 2006 with 297,127 scrobbles myself.
- kaizenb 11mo agonice!
- ndespres 11mo agoSep 23, 2004 here! 285k scrobbles. Always been a loyal user. My use goes back far enough that I would have scrobbles queued up for when my dialup connection came online to push the days’ missed scrobbles up.
- iamacyborg 11mo agoJun 8th ‘07, 535,618k scrobbles. My usage went way up once I was able to properly scrobble listens played via my hifi.
- Graziano_M 11mo agoscrobbling since 10 Mar 2006 with 179,105 scrobbles.
- zimpenfish 11mo agoLeading on start (15 Jan 2004) but woeful in the scrobbles (55164). In my defence, it was only recently that you could sensibly scrobble from iOS with Marvis and I gave up on Spotify countless years ago.
- kaizenb 11mo agoWhat is Marvis? I'm transitioning from Spotify to Apple Music and Last.fm doesn't have integration. Does Marvis solves this problem?
- cobertos 11mo agoI just moved my scrobbling to a self-hosted instance of Koito after switching from Spotify to Jellyfin. Very happy with the change, as I can still share all my music data with friends
- garrettgarcia 11mo agoI'm still scrobbling after all these years.
- photios 11mo agoI'd stopped scrobbling like 10 years ago, but recently got into it again. My 16yo son discovered Last.fm and scrobblibg and got me to install the Jellyfin scrobbler plugin. And I recovered my old account! I got some boomer music jokes from him, but it was worth it.
- mdotmertens 11mo agoI left Spotify when their CEO made a military investment. Breaking free from their recommendation algorithm and dedicating time to discovering music has been a transformative experience. I am delighted that numerous tools still utilize scrobbling. My favorite recent discovery is Tapmusic. [0] [0] https://www.tapmusic.net/ https://www.tapmusic.net/
- veeti 11mo ago[flagged]
- dev_l1x_be 11mo agoAlso from this era and loosely related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace
- glitchcrab 11mo agoGood lord, Oink was only around for 4 years? I was one of the earlier signups and it felt more like 10 years.
- huflungdung 11mo ago[dead]
- zukzuk 11mo agoMaybe because what.cd picked up the torch and carried on for another few years? For me there was some sense of continuity between the two.
- emsixteen 11mo agoI miss it deeply.
- wantlotsofcurry 11mo agoI love last.fm with all my being. I recently created a ListenBrainz (same org as MusicBrainz) account which is an open source alternative that you don’t have to host yourself. I’m scrobbling to both places now just in case. Check out tapmusic.net too to make cool diagrams out of your scrobbled music.
- Nannooskeeska 11mo agotapmusic.org is currently parked by GoDaddy. Looks like you meant tapmusic.net
- F3nd0 11mo agoDoesn't look like Tapmusic supports ListenBrainz; does it? Then again, if all it does is collages, then ListenBrainz has a tool for that of its own.
- jszymborski 11mo agolibre.fm is also back at it!
- Semaphor 11mo agoI'm using selfhosted multi scrobbler [0] to scrobble to lfm, listenbrainz, and selfhosted koito [1]. Maybe not super useful, but fun ;) when at home, I scrobble to MS which distributes the data, when I have no VPN active on the go, I scrobble to last.fm only, which then gets used as source by MS as well, to redistribute it to the others. [0] https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler [1] https://github.com/gabehf/Koito/ https://github.com/gabehf/Koito/
- quirino 11mo agoI'm a big fan of last.fm. If you use Spotify, you can download your full listening history here: https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/ https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/. You get it in a pretty convenient JSON format and with a little bit of code it's pretty easy to create some visualizations. There are also websites for visualizing this data. I'm quite fond of this one: https://explorify.link/ https://explorify.link/. It allows you to do some custom queries.
- kaizenb 11mo agoI build a web app years ago with Spotify SDK to display top artists, songs, recents, also with a Discovery section that generates new music based on your history. You can create playlists from all sections. free @ https://echoesapp.io https://echoesapp.io
- quirino 11mo agoTried it out now, pretty nice. Note that apps built from the SDK don't have access to the full history, only up to some cutoff. I tried a couple over the years and wrongly concluded Spotify deleted your history after some time. The data download does contain everything, which was a very pleasant surprise. I didn't think I'd ever see the data from the couple years gap in my last.fm.
- kaizenb 11mo agoJust requested my data. They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?
- rapnie 11mo agoDiscouraging you to do it again.
- monster_truck 11mo agoIt typically shows up in a few days in the most extreme cases (10k+ artists, 200k+ songs played) the first time, sooner after that
- wnevets 11mo agoGoogle Music killed my used of foobar, scrobbling, soulseek and probably others.
- pogue 11mo agoI'm still so mad they killed Google Music. I uploaded ALL my downloaded tracks & ripped music from it, then they shut it down and I lost all of it :(
- wnevets 11mo agoIt wasn't migrated to YouTube Music?
- pogue 11mo agoIt seems like some of it was, but for full albums of artists they just redirected it to the official artist uploads on YouTube. But, then if those links change it breaks old playlists and I lose track of it. It was just such a convoluted mess. They promised you could upload all your music and it would be there forever, they said! Bastards...
- timthorn 11mo agoMemories. I wrote the initial Windows Media Player plugin for Audioscrobbler but didn't maintain it.
- twistslider 11mo agoLast.fm is still used quite a bit, mainly as a listening history tracker rather than a radio or recommendation engine. Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling. For everything else it's a lot more DIY, usually with third party tools at the device level. A big reason it’s still relevant is the ecosystem around it. The API hasn't really changed in 15 years, which makes it easy to build tools where a username alone is enough. That kind of lightweight social integration has mostly disappeared elsewhere. Today, the social / community side is almost entirely just Discord. Nearly every music related server has a bot that displays Last.fm stats. My estimate is that abut 10% of Last.fm their users are also active in Discord music communities. (Disclaimer: I run .fmbot, a Discord bot that integrates with Last.fm.)
- joecool1029 11mo ago> Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling. That's not true. It's missing from Apple Music but present in Tidal, Deezer, and Quobuz. It also works well with Plex. A large list from them: https://support.last.fm/t/more-ways-to-scrobble/192 https://support.last.fm/t/more-ways-to-scrobble/192
- twistslider 11mo agoThese integrations are lacking compared to Spotify. For example in Tidal you have to set it for each device where you install the app, and it doesn't work with things like casting. It's easy to forget to set it up which can cause gaps in your history. The Plex integration gets pretty close to native, but it only scrobbles after a track is done, it doesn't have 'Now Playing' support. As for Deezer and Quobuz I'm not sure. Afaik Spotify still stands alone by being set-and-forget, working on any device and having full feature support.
- ilikehurdles 11mo agoQobuz works the same way. Set and forget. Don’t know about deezer.
- binaryturtle 11mo agoI stopped scrobbling many years ago when they messed together my top artist at the time (the lovely "alan", spelled with all small letters) with other entirely unrelated artists by the same name (but with different letter case, e.g. some "Alan" this, and some "Alan" that.) It didn't represent at all what I was actually listening to, so what was the point?
- skerit 11mo agoIt has always been like this. It's a super simple system. All artists are only identified by their name. So there are a ton of artist pages out there that actually have to represent multiple artists with the same name. It's kinda silly, but oh well.
- trocado 11mo agohttps://listenbrainz.org/ https://listenbrainz.org/ is an open source scrobbler, with the advantage that it leverages the musicbrainz database and connects listens to artist and track IDs instead of names, avoiding duplicate confusion. You can keep last.fm and submit to both of you like.
- crossroadsguy 11mo agoThis is what I have been using for so many years after I deleted/lost my last.fm account. It keeps working like little magical tool in the background. I looked at libre.fm but I think all I ever saw was a waiting list.
- ostwilkens 11mo agoStill scrobbling since 2008. A lot of smaller artists used to upload their music to last.fm, and I found a lot of gems there (specifically in the swedish bitpop scene).
- esafak 11mo agoPart of the quantified self movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_self The thing with data is that you have to act on it for it to be useful, and this data is useful only to recommendation engineers. Spotify's end-of-year summary is more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mrmagoo17 11mo agoLast.fm was probably my first social network, although it probably doesn't make it justice to call it that! I am still scrobbling after so many years! Loved this article. Really good memories... Thx for sharing
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agohttps://libre.fm/ https://libre.fm/ scrobbling since 2009 built on GNU FM
- sthuck 11mo agoThe best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recommend based on my profile. I got introduced to varied music, different genres and even a bit from different countries. The worst was Pandora, which did recommendations based on breakdown of musical instruments and elements in the song. It did what it aimed to do pretty well, only it was a bad idea. It gave you a lot of uninspiring music that sounded like a bland copy of something you actually liked. Spotify's recommendations are not super awful, but definitely feel closer to Pandora's style. I wonder why is the result like that even though I'm sure they train their model based on listening history.
- ldayley 11mo agoMy favorite manual discovery/social was Napster, for that moment that you could view other user’s entire shared music folder and use the chat function to talk to them about their tastes!
- pogue 11mo agoI was just talking about this in r/piracy but I remember there was a chat function on Kazaa where you could message people you were downloading music from and ask for recommendations. Simpler times...
- pogue 11mo agoI used to pay for their radio service, it was a bit like Pandora. I found it when they added it to Xbox 360 as an app. I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into. But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it. I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.
- tantalor 11mo agoI always thought Apple missed a huge opportunity to build a social network on top of iTunes. See what your friends are listening to, develop communities around shared musical interests, get better recommendations. Sort of like YouTube now.
- PlunderBunny 11mo agoiTunes Ping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
- tantalor 11mo ago> Launched September 1, 2010 A bit late to the party.
- stuartmemo 11mo agoFunnily enough, I'm trying to do this, and just posted in "What are you Working On?" Not sure I'll have much luck if Apple couldn't make it happen though! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268285
- pogue 11mo agoLooks interesting, how do you get it to sync what I'm listening to with it? I use Pandora & YT Music as my only music services.
- stuartmemo 11mo agoThanks! Good shout, will definitely add support for YouTube. Pandora, however, is sadly blocked in the UK.
- hylaride 11mo agoFunny enough iTunes Genius was amazing at discovering new music as it created a tree of "users who bought this, also bought these songs" and I spent a fortune on the iTunes Store on single songs. It's now all but dead, probably because with apple getting a monthly cut with Apple Music either way, there's no incentive to maintain such a system.
- kome 11mo agoooo... i thought Last.fm was a rebranding of audioscrobbler; i didn't know it was a parallel project. and I am an audioscrobbler user since 2006! and I've used it to this day, i mean, last.fm. very interesting article!
- pluc 11mo agoI guess I'm gonna pop in here and mention libre.fm
- xrd 11mo agoWhen I read the negative take on "it's always somebody else selecting the music for you" I really recoiled. My favorite way to listen to music today is BECAUSE there is someone choosing it for me. I love the human stories behind the music, and it is totally missing with algorithmic stuff. I love Gilles Peterson, and Derek Smith on KMHD, for example, exactly because they are terrific and interesting people and they bring that humanity with their choice of tracks. When they interview people it is so much more interesting as a companion to the music. My favorite thing about Napster and LimeWire was when you could find a song, and then BROWSE the hard drive of the person hosting that song. It was so interesting to find house music and be digging through the tastes of someone in London. And, then chatting with them, and discovering the live scenes, the people behind the music, etc. I loved that and nothing has ever replaced it. Having said all this, I am interested in playing with "scrobbling." Anyone have any advice on how to get started? Do you need a music library? Is there a way to import your playlists from YouTube music? I'm not a spotify person.
- staticshock 11mo agoi used to use last.fm with winamp and the like. that needed scrobbling plugins. nowadays, i use it with spotify, and it's pretty simple: (1) make an account on last.fm. (2) go into spotify settings → social → connected apps, and add it in.
- AuthAuth 11mo agoIf you use streaming you can link it to lastfm or Listenbrainz(open source alternative). It will automagically scrobble your listening over. Otherwise you need to find a music player that supports it or has a plugin to add the functionality. I use tauron for scrobbling my local listening.
- acephal 11mo ago> My favorite thing about Napster and LimeWire was when you could find a song, and then BROWSE the hard drive of the person hosting that song. Soulseek lets you do this and is still going
- erikig 11mo ago
- wormius 11mo agoI miss the old last.fm. I know it's still there, but it's not the same since CBS took over and made everything rely on youtube or whatever it's doing these days.
- The_President 11mo agoThe built-in player made it competitive with Pandora at the time.
- dunk010 11mo agoI worked at Last.fm from 2007 to 2012. The MIR team (think: research) developed a wonderful system called "RadioQL", which allowed you to stitch together custom ratio stations from any of a huge host of factors, joined together by AND, OR, and NOT. You could select artist radios, song radios, tags, and so on, but also combine this with things like the BPM or even some sentiment analysis. It was used a little bit inside some public-facing radio stations, but nobody outside of the staff ever got full access, and that's a tragedy as it was glorious.
- monster_truck 11mo agoUsed their API to pull tag data as part of a project not too long ago and had to spend a disappointing amount of time filtering out literal hate tags/slurs and widespread deliberate mistagging. It caused me to not make the code public until I can ship it with an allowlist. It's almost done but I got distracted
- Triphibian 11mo agoI find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year. It feels to me like "dark mode" (which is a merely single color of customization for an app). We expect so little from our software and services that even these little, previously common features are supposed to be a treat. Anyway, Last.fm was great -- I never used it that much for discovery, but rather to get insight into what I was listening to. Largely, it didn't say THAT much about my habits because I mostly just listened to my collection on random. My top bands were, for the most part, the bands I had the most of.
- relaxing 11mo agoLast.fm used to only update your listening stats on Friday, which turned into a fun event where everyone shared what they heard that week. Eventually the stats became live updating and a bit of fun was lost.
- Semaphor 11mo agoI'm on a music discord server (for metal), most people share their weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly charts made from their last.fm data. Here's what I posted yesterday for my weekly: https://i.imgur.com/6jYS8jG.png https://i.imgur.com/6jYS8jG.png
- Daz912 11mo ago>I find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year. Skill issue. you can export your listening history whenever you like.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mylons 11mo agolast.fm was so promising when it came out but i have to say i didn’t discover anything using their platform. chatGPT is incredible, just giving it a single song and some context, it can recommend at a rate of something like 85-90%. the only place i’ve gotten the BEST music recommendations were the oink and last.fm forums. humans, still, are the best recommendation infrastructure.
- kevinfiol 11mo agoHa! I am still using Last.fm 21 years after first discovering it. I would say my current music taste is largely thanks to Last.fm and its compatibility and "Similar Artists" features.
- BubbleRings 11mo agoI filed my collaborative filtering patent in 1995, describing the core basic way that your “desert island 5 favorite albums”, and the 5 favorites list from many other people, could be used to recommend music you would like. The patent is a nice tutorial on how it is done, check it out here if you’d like: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9d/f9/19/08ac5ef5d50b09/US5749081.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9d/f9/19/08ac5ef... Here is part of the story on my website… I’ll write it up better one of these days: https://www.whiteis.com/similarities-engine https://www.whiteis.com/similarities-engine Yeah yeah it was a software patent. If that bugs you, you can take solace in the fact that I blew it executing on monetizing it. Microsoft ended up owning it and I went on to other adventures. Here’s a list of the 456 US Patents that cite the Similarities Engine patent as prior art: https://www.whiteis.com/cites-to-se-patent https://www.whiteis.com/cites-to-se-patent
- The_President 11mo agoThe SongMeanings.com discussion boards on each lyrics page are an absolute time capsule.
- noman-land 11mo agoI still use last.fm. Been continously scrobbling since 2004. I also export my last.fm and Spotify listening history every now and again just in case. I plan to one day make a timeline of my listens overlayed on top of world and personal events. I made friends I still have by browsing people who had a compatible music taste to me and then reaching out to chat.
- ugh123 11mo agoThat would be an amazing app to journal your listening history like that with Spotify on the same phone
- sphars 11mo agoBeen scrobbling since 2008. I found out what last.fm was thanks to installing Rockbox on my iPod nano, and seeing they had this "scrobbling" feature. Had to remember to plug in the iPod, pull the scrobble log and upload it using a website someone created. If you need a scrobbler for Android (and Linux) I recommend Pano Scrobbler: https://github.com/kawaiiDango/pano-scrobbler https://github.com/kawaiiDango/pano-scrobbler
- monkeywork 11mo agoEarlier this year I decided to move away from streaming platforms and rebuild my local music collection and serve it out over Plex. Plex supports last.fm so everything gets recorded there. I also use the following docker containers on my home server: Multi-Scrobbler: https://hub.docker.com/r/foxxmd/multi-scrobbler https://hub.docker.com/r/foxxmd/multi-scrobbler Koito: https://koito.io/guides/installation/ https://koito.io/guides/installation/ This allows me to share my last.fm input to both a local scrobbler (Koito) and to listenbrainz - I figured having this data in multiple locations makes it a bit more safe. Honestly between last.fm and listenbrainz I find myself exploring more on listenbrainz - even though most of it's users don't really fit the same listening profile I do.
- mariusor 11mo agoIf you want something that doesn't require a docker container to run but still supports multiple targets, I'm maintaining a small linux daemon for that: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler
- monkeywork 11mo agofor my use case I think the docker container is better solution. I listen on several different devices so having plexamp send everything to last.fm and use that as the "source of truth" and then the docker container monitors last.fm and resends that info to other targets makes a bit more sense - this way I never have to make sure I have something running on my listening device.
- vjerancrnjak 11mo agoMade a scrobbler program for cmus when I switched to it. [0] Comparison of listeners really nails the recommendations. Similar minds like to listen to similar things. 0: https://github.com/vjeranc/cmus-status-scrobbler https://github.com/vjeranc/cmus-status-scrobbler
- mariusor 11mo agoSimilarly I made a scrobbler app (on linux) that works with all players that expose MPRIS data: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler
- scottgg 11mo agoLastfm stopped me moving from Spotify to Apple Music; none of the iOS scrobblers seem to consistently catch all listens.
- chinmaykunkikar 11mo agoSame!
- dddw 11mo agoI got a last.FM story. I used last.fm for years, then wanted tot use it again after a hiatus. But was locked out of my account, and the email I used of that service didn't exist anymore. I contacted last.fm saying what the old email was, and told them the profile picture was from a guitarist from an obscure islandic band, who's blonde hair I photo shopped into brown, so he looked more like me. They gave we a reset link. Very happy to use it again. I do wonder how they stay afloat.
- squigz 11mo agoI would guess that after so long, and without the feature creep so many platforms suffer from, last.fm has a very simple and affordable infrastructure. It's also owned by Paramount, so likely a small drop in the bucket for them. They also have ads and subs, so.
- cyrialize 11mo agoI still use Last.fm! I've had it since 2008. It's really cool seeing how my music taste has changed, and seeing what I've come back to over and over again. When I used to be much more active in online music communities I would post a 9x9 of my most listened to albums of the past week and discuss them.