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Last.fm turns 20

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Re: Last.fm turns 20

#121
uhm so i dont know if I'm having Mandela moment or Senior moment but I distinctly remember last.fm sending me an email telling me they were completely shutting down and i remember having to close my account and all my carefully curated stuff just disappeared into nothing.

the old service was really cool but it stopped. i have no idea wtf people are talking about when they say its '20 years old'. it literally ceased to exist.

i realize it may have been replaced with something else, but that something else bears almost no resemblance to what it was.

please help - a confused old man

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#122

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 musi…

thank you, i thought i had lost my damn mind. i was like wtf are people talking about 20 years old. it shut down and i lost all my stuff , years and years ago. i dont know what it is anymore but its like last.fm in name only

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#124
post #92

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.

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.

https://listenbrainz.org/ exists, it can import your Last.fm history, and it is backed by the same foundation that builds MusicBrainz.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#125
One of the first "Web 2.0" apps I remember using next to Gmail; it was called Audioscrobbler back then. I used the scrobble feature religiously to log my listening habits from 2005-2012.

While Last.fm failed to capitalize on early innovations like the social media features and algorithmic online radio, the "scrobble" feature oddly enough stood the test of time. Even though it was the pre-smartphone age, developers built unofficial applications to let you log your listens from almost anywhere: iPod/iTunes, Windows Media Center-compatible MP3 players, and eventually any audio player that ran the hacked Rockbox OS, including the iPod 5G.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#127
Big fan of last.fm and have used it when compiling my "year in review" posts.

It's a great service and, as others have mentioned, it really does a great job of finding obscure and relevant suggestions on underground metal bands that I enjoy.

It's particularly good at high quality, relevant recommendations for new bands with little following.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#128

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 servi…

that's a funny edit.

are you surprised by your last.fm statistics? will you delete the account?

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#129

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 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 sub…

The thing a human recommended can do is say “based on your listening history, I think you'd also like this band... but wait, they're a famous band. Surely you'd know about them already. So the fact that you don't listen to them suggests that you don't like them. Ok, I won't recommend them.” Computers don't yet make that logical leap -- they don't yet use what's missing from your listening history as additional data.

Re: Last.fm turns 20

#130

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 musi…

thank you, i thought i had lost my damn mind. i was like wtf are people talking about 20 years old. it shut down and i lost all my stuff , years and years ago. i dont know what it is anymore but its like last.fm in name only

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