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Last.fm turns 20

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Re: Last.fm turns 20

#31

Post by Apocryphon »

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#32

Post by nathias »

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#33

Post by randomsofr »

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#34

Post by Euphorbium »

beardyw wrote: post #29

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…

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#35

Post by Mountain_Skies »

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#36

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

Oxidation wrote: post #23
unvs wrote: post #4

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

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".

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#37

Post by powersnail »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

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 las…

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!

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#38

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

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 las…

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#39

Post by rx_tx »

rcarr wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#40

Post by thebrain »

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.
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