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.
Last.fm turns 20
111–120 of 178 posts
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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"…
did you catch a Pavement reunion show?
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#113Brings me back. Who else was on OiNK and what.cd back in the day?
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#114Last.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.
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#115I 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.
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#116So 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?
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#117I 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.
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> For example, a person who likes Black Sabbath, and really technical instrumental metal, probably doesn't like the comparatively simpler slipknot That's just thinly disguised metal snobbery. Almost all metalheads adore Black Sabbath, because they wrote fantastic songs . Sabbath's music caught on because it's so accessible. They were certainly good musicians, but by no means anywhere near the top of the Technical Sop…
> Almost all metalheads adore Black Sabbath
This implies that, if there are many different subgenres with little overlap in audience but they all agree on Black Sabbath (and little else), drawing conclusions from "listens to Black Sabbath" is doomed to fail. "Listens to Black Sabbath" simply isn't particularly specific, and those subgenre-heads are all about specifity. Same as that you can draw a lot more conclusions from "likes listening to Number Nine" than from "likes listening to Yesterday"
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Seems like there's one here: https://github.com/benfoxall/lastfm-to-csv
Re: Last.fm turns 20
#120I 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…
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.
It definitely persists, it's just that now our Apple Watch does it without needing to build the dashboard ourselves :)