[HN Gopher] Last.fm turns 20
___________________________________________________________________
Last.fm turns 20
Author : embit
Score : 204 points
Date : 2022-11-23 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| tdjsnelling wrote:
| One of the few subscription services I would happily pay more
| for, for the recommendations alone.
| unvs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| conradfr wrote:
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 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.
| pmlnr wrote:
| I keep pointing this out and it seems like nobody believes
| me.
|
| I miss the last.fm radio so much!
| gtirloni wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lolive wrote:
| How can I listen to Last.fm recommendations on my smartphone?
| Their app is no longer in the App Store in Europe.
| jollyllama wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| 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.
| SimonPStevens wrote:
| I had always assumed that recommendation algorithms didn't work
| on genres, but instead did a lookup based on something like:
|
| "You like X" "Person Y also likes X" "Person Y also likes Z" "I
| should recommended Z to you" (proportional to the number of
| people there are who liked X and Z, compared to other options)
|
| If this is the case (and perhaps I'm wrong), it's nothing to do
| with the algorithm not understanding the subtleties of the
| genre, but it's actually just that on average those subtleties
| disappear because they are unique to you. (Forgive me, I don't
| know your genres at all, but), I would guess that on average
| people who like Black Sabbath really do typically like Slipknot
| as well, and that is why the algorithm recommends them to you.
|
| It's not that the algo is any worse than human recommendations,
| it's just that it's an average of all humans likes, which will
| never fit your exact personal unique preferences because they
| aren't you.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| The term for this is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > It's not that the algo is any worse than human
| recommendations, it's just that it's an average of all humans
| likes, which will never fit your exact personal unique
| preferences because they aren't you.
|
| But that is a difference though, because humans possess
| empathy: algorithms don't. Step away from music for a second
| and consider movies: if all your algorithm does is recommend
| movies because Person X likes Movies 1, 2, and 3, it will
| take many layers of metadata tagging before the algorithm
| figures out that it shouldn't recommend Movie 2 to Person Y
| (even if Movie 2 is a star-studded, Oscar-winning classic),
| while a human being could probably spend 30 seconds looking
| at Person Y's viewing history and realize, "Ah, this person
| has very few action movies and zero horror movies in their
| viewing history; they probably don't like violence. I would
| not recommend they watch Movie 2."
| ep103 wrote:
| That's the way music-map.com works, and it is absolutely
| fantastic.
|
| But no, that is NOT the way these other services recommend
| things.
|
| Spotify, for example, recommends music that it thinks is
| related, but not necessarily liked by both groups of people.
|
| For example, a person who likes Black Sabbath, and really
| technical instrumental metal, probably doesn't like the
| comparatively simpler slipknot. While some people who like
| slipknot may like black sabbath, but even less will be aware
| of really technically advanced instrumental metal.
|
| music-map.com will take that into account. When you say "my
| three favorite bands are", you're not going to see slipknot
| show up in the result list, because people who mentioned
| those technical bands tended not to like slipknot.
|
| But if you go to spotify and listen to sabbath, you'll see
| slipknot recommendations, because there is overlap, right?
|
| I just went over to music-map right now, and sure enough,
| black sabbath and slipknot don't overlap, even when you do
| searches of the bands individually, let alone if you enter
| multiple bands.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Spotify recommends me tracks that I have already added to
| my playlists. It knows me really well.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| So I put in Silver Jews, and expected to get probably the
| #1 result "Purple Mountains" which is also David Berman,
| and then pavement and some Malkmus as recommends. So I
| don't know how well that works.
|
| Coheed and Cambria seemed fairly good. I was expecting
| Thursday as a top result and got it.
|
| I put in "Mom Jeans" and a totally very different sounding
| band but on the same label who tour together and got "Just
| Friends". That's an unexpectedly nice connection.
| willbes wrote:
| Yeah, Last.fm is really good for playing a playlist from
| a single scene. It's not necessarily a single genre, just
| bands who tour together, or guest on each other's tracks.
|
| They used to go pretty deep too, like bringing in bands
| from 20 years before that influenced the current one.
|
| It's not necessarily the greatest for bands that are
| selling out stadiums as there's too much interference
| from Clear Channel, but it's great for small to midsize
| scenes which tend to have shows from 100-1000, since
| those tend to be more defined.
| kqr wrote:
| This sounds like a fairly easy optimisation, actually. Whereas
| a human goes "Oh, so you mentioned A, B, and C, but not the
| otherwise popular D" and conditions on all that information, a
| simple recommendation system would just go "ah I see you didn't
| mention popular D, that must be because you don't know about
| them!"
|
| Should be fairly easy to adjust the recommendation system so
| that it conditions on what you specifically did not mention,
| assuming that the most popular of that stuff you know about
| already.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| A lot of people are not aware that Last.fm has a lot of these
| "Human recommendation" mechanisms. they are just kind of
| indirect. For exple, those humans could be
|
| - People with whom you share recent top artists -> the
| "neighbours" feature
|
| - People who also like that obscure favourite track of yours ->
| the "X listen to Y a lot" feature (or even just a delightful
| Shout on that track)
|
| I often just convert the Loved ones from their "Top 100 Tracks"
| into a Spotify playlist (I may even filter it by genre
| beforehand)
|
| The whole point is you don't have very similar taste to them.
| Still, you can find some totally unexpected gems.
| abawany wrote:
| Yeah, music and other such automated recommendations are truly
| infuriating - I like to imagine it is an attempt to tweak
| people instead of helping them. This belief is reinforced when
| often these recommendations don't come with a 'never recommend
| again' or 'stop recommending altogether, please' option. I am
| grateful though that such 'helpful' behavior is often
| successful in helping me get off the service in question and
| not use it again.
| powersnail wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It depends on how the recommendation system define 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.
| mahathu wrote:
| > Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic
| recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes
|
| I completely agree. But last.fm doesn't do human review either,
| right? OTOH, I think the "radio" feature on spotify is wildly
| underrated. I used to spend hours compiling playlists for
| different moments/social settings/moods (still do, because it's
| fun), but picking any song/album/artist and then getting an
| endless stream of similar music is an amazing feature.
| Unfortunately, sometimes it screws up and will suggest me the
| same songs over and over again and there is no way to get a
| little more control over the algorithm.
|
| I came to hate the Superstar cover by Sonic Youth and "I'm So
| Tired" by Fugazi for those reasons. Great songs, but they just
| kept coming up as the first recommended track and I can't stand
| hearing those intro piano chords on the latter anymore!!
| According to my last.fm [0] I played it 50+ times and I don't
| even remember once seeking out that song or putting it in one
| of my playlists.
|
| https://www.last.fm/user/mahathu
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > But last.fm doesn't do human review either, right?
|
| No, but to be fair, that's not my use-case. My use-case is
| going to forums of like-minded individuals and saying "Hey, I
| need more music like _____. Take a look at my last.fm profile
| and suggest something I'd like."
|
| I use it the same way book lovers use their Goodreads
| profile, I suppose?
| maxrev17 wrote:
| Pandora was the best for recommendations. They stopped it being
| available in the UK over a decade ago, made me sad!
| crispyambulance wrote:
| There was a time when last.fm recommendations were uncannily
| good. I haven't used the service for a very long time so I
| can't say much about what they're like now or how they compare
| with stuff like music.youtube, Spotify or Pandora, but I recall
| when they were the darling "it" thing as far as music goes.
|
| "Audio-Scrobbling"! It was hot off the end of the web 2.0 craze
| along with flickr and delicious. Good times. We weren't
| expecting the evil parts yet. I dropped off probably around
| 2012 or earlier.
|
| As much as I enjoy good recs and an endless, mildly interesting
| playlist, the surveillance capitalism in the sauce is a real
| turn off.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Two things I like to see trailed in music recommendation
| algorithms would be:
|
| 1. Associations happen at a song level. At the moment when
| artists are recommended you get what I call the "Red Hot Chilli
| Peppers" effect. That is, the artist that basically everyone
| seems to have in common in their playlists is RHCP. Instead, I
| think the recommendations should be more granular, at a _song_
| level. Artists can diverge quite wildly in style between
| individual songs (Ween being an extreme example of this). Take
| for example Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvrOzYtnLMA) this is great
| song but wildly different from say "War Pigs". In fact, it's a
| dubby, groovy slow jam.
|
| 2. Weight follow on plays more highly. So taking War Pigs in
| the point above. I listen to Planet Caravan and it makes me
| think of this great remix of Wicked Game by Trentemoller
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph4z3u7IwrM). A totally
| unrelated artist and genre yet somehow linked in my mind. My
| assumption is that people that listen to Planet Caravan would
| also have a high likelihood of enjoying the Wicked Game remix
| because it has a similar... vibe I guess?
|
| Anybody want to collaborate on building a recommendation engine
| around these two points? I'd be more than happy to record what
| I listen to as training data for it.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| The only site that finds better similar artist matches for me
| is https://www.metal-archives.com.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| 118,359 scrobbles since Feb 2006 and still going strong. Love
| sending all my listens to last.fm.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| haunter wrote:
| 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.f...
| politelemon wrote:
| 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-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 wrote:
| Last.fm is still fantastic! Spotify natively supports it, and
| I've never stopped scrobbling.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| hunglee2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I hope Last.FM never goes away; I've been tracking my scrobbles
| since 2005
| dividefuel wrote:
| 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.
| fetzu wrote:
| That's the pro-tip of the day folks! Last.fm is actually at
| the top of my "things to backup at the beginning of each
| year" list, there are quite a few website that allow you to
| generate a CSV in minutes, and even some pretty decent CLI
| tools.
| carl_dr wrote:
| 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
| mattl wrote:
| I've seen users with 1.7 million scrobbles on Libre.fm
| (which means they imported their scrobble history)
| punchclockhero wrote:
| Aw shucks,low compatibility.
|
| https://www.last.fm/user/unspotted
| dpcx wrote:
| 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
| carl_dr wrote:
| Late 90s me would have had a higher compatibility with
| you, there are a few blasts from my past in your
| scrobbles. Followed!
| xn wrote:
| I've got high compatibility with carldr.
|
| https://www.last.fm/user/xn
| carl_dr wrote:
| You signed up to last.fm (well, audioscrobbler) two days
| after I did in 2005. I've followed you there, I'll trawl
| through your top tracks tomorrow.
|
| I'm surprised/happy to see iLiKETRAINS as your top track.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Same here. Since the pre-merger days when it was just
| Audioscrobbler and we all had those cool signature images in
| the forums. I'm at 283k scrobbles now.
| yarg wrote:
| I really liked AudioScrobbler as a name, the site felt like it
| lost a piece of its personality when it changed.
| drawkbox wrote:
| Same here. I love Last.fm for the scrobbling and history of
| what I listen to. I also scrobble to Libre.FM and a custom one
| but Last.FM is still my favorite.
|
| Currently at 94,000+ scrobbles since June 2007.
|
| You can scrobble from almost anything including the Last.FM
| client, WebScrobbler [1] and some streaming apps have it built
| in like Spotify.
|
| [1] https://web-scrobbler.com/
| ilvez wrote:
| It's so good addon. Im so happy that I discovered it and
| through this DKFM radio.
| ilvez wrote:
| High five, my current account is also from 2005. I listen so
| much stuff and also forget as well, but the heart button is the
| life saver. Still scrobbling every day.
| n2j3 wrote:
| Lastcord (last.fm on discord) is the place to be if you miss
| last.fm groups
| disposition2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| achairapart wrote:
| 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.
| fetzu wrote:
| 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 !
| djhworld wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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) !
| thebrain wrote:
| 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.
| bromuro wrote:
| 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!!
| bentt wrote:
| I still don't understand what scrobbling is
| lzooz wrote:
| 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.
| adityeah wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Anyone found a better scrobbling service? Preferably that one
| can self host?
| warp wrote:
| https://listenbrainz.org/ is open source (from the
| MusicBrainz ppl), though not really intended for self-
| hosting.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I believe FunkWhale is attempting something along these
| lines: https://fediverse.party/en/funkwhale/
| haroldp wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/eo77m1/is_there.
| ..
| moolcool wrote:
| Spotify is still scrobbling!
| nlnn wrote:
| 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.
| wantlotsofcurry wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]: https://tapmusic.net/
| asenchi wrote:
| I still use this website to produce collages. Thank you! :)
| corobo wrote:
| 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.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I'm curious how easy it would be to make a pure scrobbling
| service competitor to last.fm.
| charlieegan3 wrote:
| 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.
| mradek wrote:
| 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.
| dewey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >> (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 wrote:
| 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.
| benbristow wrote:
| 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.
| eric8bits wrote:
| Still love it to this day. I have Roon and TIDAL connected for
| automatic scrobbling.
| lolive wrote:
| Wake me up when spotifynewmusic.com is resurrected. [the only
| music discovery service that really made me discover uncanny
| things]
| rcarr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| beardyw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nunez wrote:
| 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)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway874839 wrote:
| 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, something like Goodreads but for music[1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Try removing and re-adding the connection. This occasionally
| happens to me too.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Well, I am glad it's working again... whew
| randomsofr wrote:
| 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.
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