121–130 of 232 posts
the previous owner doesnt appear to be mentioned in the post (or, at least, not easily found). CBS Coporation (owned by Paramount) bought last.fm in 2007
The only consequence from an insiders point of view is we suddenly needed training on the "Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" since last.fm was a UK company.
Congratulations to last.fm on this, although I'm not sure what I can do that actually "scrobbles" at this point. I went to their download page for the Mac desktop app, which somewhat forebodingly referred to "what you've been playing in iTunes" rather than Apple Music, and downloaded it anyway. It's an Intel-only app, not universal, and it doesn't appear to be signed, so macOS Tahoe screams about it being possible ma…
Spotify scrobbles to Last.FM (it's built-in to Spotify as a setting somewhere, from memory). On Windows, MusicBee will scrobble everything you play through it. On Android, the Last.FM app can watch playback notifications of Android music apps that you select and scrobble those - the app itself doesn't have to have Last.FM support. But I don't know about for Mac & iOS.
That setting has been removed a few years ago. It now works the other way round: You authorise last.fm to access your Spotify data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the recommendation engines behind Spotify, Youtube Music, etc compare to the recommendations I got from last.fm over the years. The algorithmic ones seem to have a bunch of issues that bug me as a long time music listener and someone with a large music library. - their memory is short as hell so you can listen to something for a while, stop and then it'll suggest it to you later as something to "discove…
That's because the recommendation engine that Last.fm used back in the day was made the incredibly expensive way: the entire corpus was hand-tagged and cross-linked by humans atop an enormous CDDB. Last.fm, Audioscrobbler, and MusicBrainz (the association engine) were all linked together.
Essentially if people who listen to many of the same artists/tracks as I do have discovered other things I have not, then those unseen artists/tracks become candidate recommendations.
It worked as well as it did because they had a user base of music fans with a wide variety of tastes. CBS ran them into trouble when they upset those fans by breaking the radio and by being perceived as too close to the RIAA.
The will need to get the numbers up, but I'm hoping them being independent again is a good sign.
Happy to see they mentioned their API usage won't change. Last year I was working on a small project ( https://listeningfacts.com ) around spotify's API but they decided to suddenly restrict access to it. I was able to make it work with last.fm's API with no issue and they're more generous with the information they provide.
I also had the delight of finding my streams from 2008 still in my history after not logging in for several years.
last.fm is one of my very favorite services. It's rough around the edges in some parts, but I've gotten incredible value from it. A couple of websites built on it that I check out from time to time: - https://lastfmviz.netlify.app/ - shows what you've been listening to as a grid of album covers. You can scroll down as long as you want. It's cool to look back and remember where I was when listening to specific music.…
Man i love last.fm even though it's been technically superseded (for most people) by Spotify's recommendation features. It just fit so well in the zeitgeist of 2000's indie scene, microblogs, early social media.
One problem for me with Spotify and similar is that I don't use them. I want to be able to track what I've listened to but I only use my own, personal library via iTunes, not Apple Music. Perhaps I'm wrong and some of these other services will track that but I don't have any desire to use the full on streaming services.
Happy they are independent and allowing access to their API. Seems like it may be time to work on a personal project to track the data in a way that matters to me, rather than just what you normally get built in.
Man i love last.fm even though it's been technically superseded (for most people) by Spotify's recommendation features. It just fit so well in the zeitgeist of 2000's indie scene, microblogs, early social media.
Unfortunately they have recently taken a rather drastic step towards undermining this community aspect of the site by gating the comment (or "shout", as they call it) box behind a "SEE WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING BUTTON". Previously the top 5-10 comments would by default be visible on every artist/album/track page, but now there's an extra level of indirection you've go to go through to see or post comments. The move was never justified despite the vocal community's outrage on their forums [1], but I suspect it's got something to do with the site's poor performance, as previously comments failed to load about 30% of the time. Strange, yeah.
I've cancelled my Pro subscription a while ago as a result, but I'm excited to see what their independence from Paramount will bring.
Man i love last.fm even though it's been technically superseded (for most people) by Spotify's recommendation features. It just fit so well in the zeitgeist of 2000's indie scene, microblogs, early social media.
I just think it's beautiful that I can see all the music I've listened to since 2005 (back when it was still called Audioscrobbler, before the Last.fm rename). And I never stopped scrobbling in all that time! I love these kinds of stats and being able to see how my taste has changed across more than 20 years, since I was a teenager. I do miss the old community forums they had integrated back in the day, though.
It's not anymore, right?