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2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

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Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#51

Post by acephal »

xrd wrote: post #42

When I read the negative take on "it's always somebody else selecting the music for you" I really recoiled. My favorite way to listen to music today is BECAUSE there is someone choosing it for me. I love the human stories behind the music, and it is totally missing with algorithmic stuff. I love Gilles Peterson, and Derek Smith on KMHD, for example, exactly because they are terrific and interesting people and they br…

> My favorite thing about Napster and LimeWire was when you could find a song, and then BROWSE the hard drive of the person hosting that song.

Soulseek lets you do this and is still going

Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#52

Post by ldayley »

sthuck wrote: post #35

The best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recom…

My favorite manual discovery/social was Napster, for that moment that you could view other user’s entire shared music folder and use the chat function to talk to them about their tastes!

Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#53

Post by pogue »

sthuck wrote: post #35

The best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recom…

I used to pay for their radio service, it was a bit like Pandora. I found it when they added it to Xbox 360 as an app.

I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into.

But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it.

I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.

Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#54

Post by monster_truck »

kaizenb wrote: post #32
quirino wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried it out now, pretty nice. Note that apps built from the SDK don't have access to the full history, only up to some cutoff. I tried a couple over the years and wrongly concluded Spotify deleted your history after some time. The data download does contain everything, which was a very pleasant surprise. I didn't think I'd ever see the data from the couple years gap in my last.fm.

Just requested my data. They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?

It typically shows up in a few days in the most extreme cases (10k+ artists, 200k+ songs played) the first time, sooner after that

Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#55

Post by hylaride »

tantalor wrote: post #36

I always thought Apple missed a huge opportunity to build a social network on top of iTunes. See what your friends are listening to, develop communities around shared musical interests, get better recommendations. Sort of like YouTube now.

Funny enough iTunes Genius was amazing at discovering new music as it created a tree of "users who bought this, also bought these songs" and I spent a fortune on the iTunes Store on single songs.

It's now all but dead, probably because with apple getting a monthly cut with Apple Music either way, there's no incentive to maintain such a system.

Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#56

Post by pogue »

ldayley wrote: post #52
sthuck wrote: post #35

The best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recom…

My favorite manual discovery/social was Napster, for that moment that you could view other user’s entire shared music folder and use the chat function to talk to them about their tastes!

I was just talking about this in r/piracy but I remember there was a chat function on Kazaa where you could message people you were downloading music from and ask for recommendations. Simpler times...

Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#59

Post by monster_truck »

Used their API to pull tag data as part of a project not too long ago and had to spend a disappointing amount of time filtering out literal hate tags/slurs and widespread deliberate mistagging.

It caused me to not make the code public until I can ship it with an allowlist. It's almost done but I got distracted

Re: 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

#60

Post by zimpenfish »

kaizenb wrote: post #32
quirino wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried it out now, pretty nice. Note that apps built from the SDK don't have access to the full history, only up to some cutoff. I tried a couple over the years and wrongly concluded Spotify deleted your history after some time. The data download does contain everything, which was a very pleasant surprise. I didn't think I'd ever see the data from the couple years gap in my last.fm.

Just requested my data. They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?

> They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?

There's probably one person nursing some horrific bogslop software that frequently breaks but absolutely cannot be rewritten or changed (because it was someone's pet project) and frequently has to be manually twizzled to get things out of what is probably a hostile data retrieval environment and they're just TIRED and that's why there's a 30 day leeway because otherwise the Data Retrieval Goblin would be way over the line of overwhelmed rather than just under it all the time.

Probably.

(I realise I've likely described a significant percentage of companies there.)

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