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Last.fm is now independent

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Re: Last.fm is now independent

#111

Post by chrsw »

ale wrote: post #6

Man i love last.fm even though it's been technically superseded (for most people) by Spotify's recommendation features.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 loved how easy it was to scrobble from different music services. Haven't used it in years though so I have no idea if that's still the case. Stuff like that usually rots because it's not making someone money.

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#112

Post by SyneRyder »

verelo wrote: post #25
punkbit wrote: post #16

Last.fm used to be special, but this was a long time ago. Just tried to login, recovered the password and seems that its just a tracker nowadays. In the past I could listen to music and drop a comment, meet new people, etc.

Came here to say the same. I don't even know what this product is anymore. The website makes it sound like its about music but there is no music? I'm lost. The last time I paid for LastFM was some time in 2009...but the home page just isn't clearly telling me what the service offers.

Among the people I know still using Last.FM, it's somewhere between having statistics about your music, and a recommendation engine. It isn't about playing the music, you can do that elsewhere. But by having data on every single piece of music you've listened to, it can recommend music you will like, and potentially recommend people with shared musical tastes as well. There's a feature to compare your musical compatibility with others.

For me, many years ago Last.FM recommended this weird electronic band that I'd never heard of, with the strange name "Boards Of Canada". That Last.FM recommendation was responsible for introducing me to my 2nd most listened to band of all time (just behind NIN). 2026 is many hexagons, dandelions and an inferno later.

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#113

Post by pdxandi »

This is great news! I worked on the redesign and replatform with last.fm when they were part CBS Interactive. They were a lovely team of engineers and designers who cared about their product, and I appreciated their culture. Fun memories spending time in London with the team. Glad to hear they found a new home!

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#114

Post by barcode_feeder »

quirino wrote: post #29

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.…

Thanks for sharing lastfmstats, wasn't familiar with that one! Delightful and nostalgic seeing the listens sliced as they have

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#115

Post by kgwxd »

Clicked join: "Your request was blocked. To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe."

Linux, Firefox, uBlock Origin. Nothing else special. I've really been looking for an alternative too. Thanks for at least showing me what to expect before sign up. Guess I'll pass.

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#116

Post by dateutli »

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.

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#117

Post by yankcrime »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #103

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…

There are a number of utilities like Neptunes (https://micropixels.software/apps/neptunes) that will do this for you on macOS.

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#118

Post by hylaride »

xmprt wrote: post #94
Arubis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Spotify has that as well. Tons of user curated playlists. And although user playback data is harder to parse through, it's also pretty straightforward to build some clustering algorithm where if you both like X then you might like Y as well.

My theory is that they don't have the incentive. Apple Genius was ridiculously good at music discovery, too. I shudder to think how much I spent on iTunes songs via genius over its run. But now that apple/spotify/etc get my monthly dollars either way, there's no huge incentive for them to create the discovery systems.

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#119

Post by thinkdecidedo »

Wow, I hope this is good news! I'm in my 21st year of scrobbling and still so obsessed with the stats. Just recently, I built a browser extension [1] to make batch editing more convenient and to get even more data about my scrobbles.

[1] https://github.com/hummingme/scrobblescrubbler

Re: Last.fm is now independent

#120

Post by joenot443 »

quirino wrote: post #29

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.…

Give LastWave a try! My buddy built it back in college and updated it recently.

https://savas.ca/lastwave/

Generates a groovy wave chart of all your past listening.

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