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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

#61

Post by twistslider »

moolcool wrote: post #34
twistslider wrote: post #17

Last.fm is still used quite a bit, mainly as a listening history tracker rather than a radio or recommendation engine. Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling. For everything else it's a lot more DIY, usually with third party tools at the device level. A big reason it’s still relevant is the ecosystem around it. The API hasn't really changed in 15 years, which makes it ea…

Missing last.fm support is the only thing keeping me from switching from Spotify to Apple Music

Yeah, this seems to be the case for a lot of people. I frequently get support tickets asking how to connect Apple Music. There are some alternative players you can use, but it's not really an accessible solution suitable for mainstream use

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

#62

Post by pogue »

stuartmemo wrote: post #48
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.

Funnily enough, I'm trying to do this, and just posted in "What are you Working On?" Not sure I'll have much luck if Apple couldn't make it happen though! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268285

Looks interesting, how do you get it to sync what I'm listening to with it? I use Pandora & YT Music as my only music services.

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

#63

Post by zimpenfish »

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…

> When I read the negative take on "it's always somebody else selecting the music for you" I really recoiled.

Someone clearly didn't listen to John Peel and Andy Kershaw in their youth.

(also, IN MY DAY, it was generally somebody else selecting the music for you - radio DJs/programmers, TV music shows, availability of things in shops, being able to actually get to the damn shops, etc. None of this choose your own adventure streaming or digital music malarkey.)

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

#64

Post by zimpenfish »

Graziano_M wrote: post #50
iamacyborg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jun 8th ‘07, 535,618k scrobbles. My usage went way up once I was able to properly scrobble listens played via my hifi.

scrobbling since 10 Mar 2006 with 179,105 scrobbles.

Leading on start (15 Jan 2004) but woeful in the scrobbles (55164).

In my defence, it was only recently that you could sensibly scrobble from iOS with Marvis and I gave up on Spotify countless years ago.

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

#65

Post by Zambyte »

quirino wrote: post #11

I'm a big fan of last.fm. If you use Spotify, you can download your full listening history here: https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/ . You get it in a pretty convenient JSON format and with a little bit of code it's pretty easy to create some visualizations. There are also websites for visualizing this data. I'm quite fond of this one: https://explorify.link/ . It allows you to do some custom queries.

Thanks for the tip. I just logged in to my Spotify account for the first time in years so I can export my data :)

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

#66

Post by Triphibian »

I find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year.

It feels to me like "dark mode" (which is a merely single color of customization for an app). We expect so little from our software and services that even these little, previously common features are supposed to be a treat.

Anyway, Last.fm was great -- I never used it that much for discovery, but rather to get insight into what I was listening to. Largely, it didn't say THAT much about my habits because I mostly just listened to my collection on random. My top bands were, for the most part, the bands I had the most of.

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

#67

Post by mylons »

last.fm was so promising when it came out but i have to say i didn’t discover anything using their platform.

chatGPT is incredible, just giving it a single song and some context, it can recommend at a rate of something like 85-90%.

the only place i’ve gotten the BEST music recommendations were the oink and last.fm forums. humans, still, are the best recommendation infrastructure.

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

#68

Post by ivape »

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…

So, all I’m hearing is that, when we actually took the humans out of the loop and replaced them with algorithms, all the humanity disappeared?

”If take human out … why human there no more???”

It’s shocking this species is able to come up with such advanced technologies when the above is the existential question that plagues them in the macro.

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

#69

Post by rapfaria »

zukzuk wrote: post #47
glitchcrab wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord, Oink was only around for 4 years? I was one of the earlier signups and it felt more like 10 years.

Maybe because what.cd picked up the torch and carried on for another few years? For me there was some sense of continuity between the two.

There was. Oink spawned both wcd and waffles. wcd spawned a few including RED.

Next thursday, RED will have been around longer than WCD...

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

#70

Post by fleebee »

ndespres wrote: post #19
doublerabbit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking mine, scrobbling since 9 Oct 2006 with 297,127 scrobbles myself.

Sep 23, 2004 here! 285k scrobbles. Always been a loyal user. My use goes back far enough that I would have scrobbles queued up for when my dialup connection came online to push the days’ missed scrobbles up.

Sep 28, 2004 for me. Word must've spread that week.
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