ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
86% Positive
Analyzed from 7204 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#last#music#spotify#https#more#years#still#listening#recommendations#artists
Discussion (200 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
- 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.
- https://lastfmstats.com/ - generates tons of rankings, line charts, racing bar charts, etc. A couple I like: "Artist streaks" (I listened to Pavement tracks 122 times in a row in August 2023), "Unique artists in a single month" (225 in July 2025) and "Unique weeks per artist/album/track" (good to identify what you're always listening to vs. what you listened to heavily in a specific time)
- https://pmcdonough8133.github.io/last.timer/ - shows your listening rankings by hours, minutes instead of just scrobble count. This really should be a default feature in the site, as some artists have average track length 2-3x times of others.
If you use Spotify, another site I've had loads of fun with is https://explorify.link/.
https://savas.ca/lastwave/
Generates a groovy wave chart of all your past listening.
Sent some waves to a couple of friends
I've wanted to build something like this for a long time, cool (and unsurprising, really) to see it's already done!
Swans is my number 30 by scrobbles but 4 by playtime, which makes total sense.
E.g. Fishmans - Long Season is a 40 minute song, but the website's considers it as divided into 4-5 parts. And you don't have to listen to the full song to get a scrobble.
In the Spotify data you get the exact number of seconds you listened to it. And it is surprisingly complete and easy to use too. With LLMs I bet you can load it into pandas and construct queries for any insight you want in seconds.
The advertising profile was especially interesting since a) I don't think the brands expected anyone outside of their marketing teams to see some of these names b) I've had premium for most of the time I've used Spotify, but they're still putting in full effort on generating an ad profile in case that ever changes
- their memory is short as hell so you can listen to something for a while, stop and then it'll suggest it to you later as something to "discover"
- they are way too biased towards recently listened music and will replay things over and over if you're not actively managing your queues.
- because they're so based on what you have listened to (recently) they suggest things that are extremely obvious music no one is "discovering"
- they suggest the "top" songs from artists, albums, etc, it's very hard to get it to play a "deep cut"
- if you have a large library you'll inevitably hit playlist song limits and other things silently. Each service handles this differently, Youtube Music seemingly kicks things out of my library or liked playlists each time I add something else.
I've literally just gotten in the habit of never using the autoplay features and just starting whole albums from start to finish again because the algorithms annoy me so much. Youtube Music has been getting worse about it too where now it often ignores the music you chose to start a playlist and starts playing things you've listened to recently regardless of it doesn't match the genre/vibe at all.
Essentially if people who listen to many of the same artists/tracks as I do have discovered other things I have not, then those unseen artists/tracks become candidate recommendations.
It worked as well as it did because they had a user base of music fans with a wide variety of tastes. CBS ran them into trouble when they upset those fans by breaking the radio and by being perceived as too close to the RIAA.
The will need to get the numbers up, but I'm hoping them being independent again is a good sign.
Sadly many years ago pandora bacame US only, so I couldnt use it (did not bother with VPN).
Like if I start listening to house music, it will just recommend 100 songs that have organ 2 [0], even though house music is more diverse than that. Then it forces me to thumbs down the music, which also isn't what I want to do, because I have no idea what effect it's having on my recommendations. Is it just going to stop recommending house music altogether? Is it going to stop recommending songs with organ 2? Is it smart enough to understand that I just want less and not none? I do like organ 2, I just don't want to drown in it when I'm trying to find new music.
Or I will thumbs up a phonk song and it it just floods me with phonk remixes of pop songs.
Last.fm, on the other hand, seemed to have some way of towing a line of different enough without going too far. Both YTM and Spotify algos just do cookiecutter similarity.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq61C8gndjM
I feel this. Social media algorithms can be so complex and opaque now that I have to consciously consider what repercussions my interactions have. I have so little idea what interactions affect recommendations on e.g. Instagram that it almost feels random.
I tried to import my music life into Google Music, uploading my lifetime of libraries there. When they wound that down I just lost trust in online services and now do it through Nextcloud, which honestly is pretty awesome imo. There's no algorithmic suggestion for better or worse, but none of the "who ordered that" style assumptions imposed on you by the system like those you outlined above.
That, and the desktop app and confusion between library and Apple Music streaming was annoying to manage. They need to unify that experience or split it completely.
Hot artists, in my estimation, are more about bot campaigns to kick off and sweeten ‘hotness’ as they’re in an ongoing war against other talent of the moment (with shady labels on all sides).
I understand that if your recommendations are based on “people who like this also tend to like that” then you’re right in the strike zone. But that approach is basically agnostic to any property of the music itself. Suppose there’s a rock band that released a specific song where they’re experimenting with a new style that has an atypically (for them) funky/jazzy influence. If I say I want more songs like that I mean songs that fuse rock/jazz/funk, not more songs that fans of [rock band] are into.
I still think for new music discovery Pandora’s approach remains the best if you really curate a station for yourself. Apple Music has been good for creating very listenable playlists though, and their new AI playlist generator has been very fun. Surprisingly, YouTube also seems to have some secret sauce where they recommend a lot of interesting stuff that I’ve genuinely never encountered before. I suspect this is because there’s a lot more amateur and experimental artists on there doing weirder stuff and it’s able to find audiences for those in ways that the music-focused services have less visibility into since their catalog is so focused on stuff from the recording industry.
I agree. There are bands where I'm not into their usual stuff but they have one or two songs that I really like. It'd be nice to drill down even father into specifics like "this one section of this one song" or even just songs that feature certain instruments or similar sounding vocals.
Edit: of course spotify-style recommendations are much much worse, I just mean that lastfm doesnt have good algorithm either because artists are not consistent in releases. What is an average between electronic cult classic "The last resort" and every other Trentemoller album in strict indie rock style? This average does not exist
I love these kinds of stats and being able to see how my taste has changed across more than 20 years, since I was a teenager.
I do miss the old community forums they had integrated back in the day, though.
I posted asking if anyone wanted to go with me since I didn't want to go alone, and she sent me a message.
Good times.
Unfortunately they have recently taken a rather drastic step towards undermining this community aspect of the site by gating the comment (or "shout", as they call it) box behind a "SEE WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING BUTTON". Previously the top 5-10 comments would by default be visible on every artist/album/track page, but now there's an extra level of indirection you've go to go through to see or post comments. The move was never justified despite the vocal community's outrage on their forums [1], but I suspect it's got something to do with the site's poor performance, as previously comments failed to load about 30% of the time. Strange, yeah.
I've cancelled my Pro subscription a while ago as a result, but I'm excited to see what their independence from Paramount will bring.
[1]: https://support.last.fm/t/artist-shoutbox/117534
It might not be as friendly as last.fm on the surface, but it is surely richer in content, and more diverse. It's a gem, and I hope Sonemnic (?) doesn't drive it to the ground.
Besides, you can't leave comments under specific tracks on RYM.
It already has. Between the worst kind of Reddit tier moderation, the extreme anti-scraping measure affecting humans (can only access album pages from artist pages here, I get 503 errors otherwise) and the hiding of its forum from public view, it's already lying on said ground.
I’ve gone back to a very 90s approach. If I like a song from an artist, I check out the album. If I hear about an artist or album from someone, I listen to do. I’m also currently making my way through a list of the top 500 albums of all time to find some gems that I missed along the way. A streaming service is helpful for this to avoid spending a fortune or collecting a lot of music I don’t end up liking, but I treat the service more like a store. Apple Music works great for this, while Spotify and YouTube Music were a bit of a mess.
Pretty much all the machine learning recommendation engines that emerged in the Netflix era were doomed to collapse under their own weight over time for non-mainstream users because the some limited number of mainstream modes dominate as most statistically "optimal" across the total user pool. These algorithms are best in the early days, when they're still exploring the content space for good novel fits but eventually get trapped into deep, boring grooves that work really well for tons of non-discriminating users with similar tastes.
Separately, in real commercial terms, they're all fundamentally poisoned by business model objectives of highlighting cheap content or servicing partnership/advertising deals, etc. And that problem also becomes more and more prominent as the companies running them grow and become more influential and as they need to squeeze harder and harder for revenue growth.
It was basically just a long, winding, wildly expensive road back to broadcast radio programming.
It was a good run for a while, but we're long due for a new model.
When Spotify bought TEN i considered moving my listening over, but the radio button we ended up with in Spotify and Youtube Music are huge disappointments in comparison, so corporatist and flattened to 1.5 dimensions, I always wondered how the magic was lost.
Bandcamp's feed (especially once you trick the UI in to showing you how to follow tags) is usually interesting to leave running but limited in its own way by the artist pool lacking mainstream tentpoles to jump off of.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest
This isn’t true, YouTube recommendations when it chooses music are amazing (no idea if YouTube Music is good I mean the video site).
Spotify recs are intentionally recommending you things cheap to stream or that have been paid for. It’s not a raw rec engine and it’s not bad cos it’s collapsing under normies, YouTube is proof of that.
AFAIK, the playlist is only generated from artists that you've followed. It will pull in tracks from different artists that feature your followed artists as well, so you get some occasional drift, which I consider a positive.
Perhaps I'm wrong and some of these other services will track that but I don't have any desire to use the full on streaming services.
I never used last.fm but I always assumed it was more like SoundCloud. It’s been a few years I don’t use SoundCloud though.
CBS Coporation (owned by Paramount) bought last.fm in 2007
The only consequence from an insiders point of view is we suddenly needed training on the "Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" since last.fm was a UK company.
My first anniversary gift to her was a pro subscription (whatever it was called at that time). I still "scrobble" via Spotify and its still the destination for my 20+ years of listening history.
I am not active on any social media except last.fm... Its crazy that when I die, my music taste is the only thing that will survive in the cloud.
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.
I also had the delight of finding my streams from 2008 still in my history after not logging in for several years.
I've still been using it since it's the best service (in my opinion) for simply tracking everything you listen to. Spotify does track the same thing but they don't really let you view the information the same way. For example, there's no way to view the list of your top artists ever like there is with last.fm (I just checked mine, it's: https://www.last.fm/user/[your username]/library/artists).
Hopefully the developers being unchained from CBS/Paramount can only mean good changes are coming to last.fm in the near future.
https://github.com/Yooooomi/your_spotify
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.
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.
Today, we have Generative AI, generating an incomprehensible number of songs that no one will ever listen to.
I don't remember if I had to pay for Last.fm or not back then, but I'd definitely pay to have access to that old system.
Just declaring themselves independent without details doesn't provide much context. I feel like Michael Scott just declared bankruptcy.
Also… independent? Come on, most businesses on Earth are ‘independent’. They don’t need “support”, they’re a business, they need a product to sell.
I’m a big fan of their no-frills service, but I wonder if their ‘independence’ will push them down the road of weird ads and entshitification.
I thought Kebab-case is usually the norm, and I don't think I've seen the "+" in any other URL paths that aren't query strings. Any ideas why they formatted it like this?
> (RFC 1866) specifies that space characters should be encoded as `+` in application/x-www-form-urlencoded content-type key-value pairs (see paragraph 8.2.1, subparagraph 1).
From https://stackoverflow.com/a/40292770
[0]: https://listenbrainz.org/
[1]: https://github.com/metabrainz/listenbrainz-server
[2]: https://github.com/gabehf/Koito/
[3]: https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler/
https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler
Scrobbles: 301,223 Scrobbling since 4 Jan 2007.
They were also the inspiration for https://artconnects.club
Like folks here in the comments mentioned last.fm was great for meeting people through music and mutual taste. I had many friends and great conversations with people that share my music taste. That indicator design showing our common music was a great deal. Now I'm building that to connect people through movies, series, albums and books. Displaying their common stuff. This is the way!
Does anyone have a setup they're happy with for scrobbling from Apple Music across different types of devices?
On Desktop (macOS) I use the official Last.FM app - however it's still a Rosetta 2 app which will be sunset in the fall :(
I haven't found anything reliable for iOS, however.
I'd recommend ListenBrainz for folks interested in similar tracking and some recommendations with clearer ownership.
For my own historical interests, I have a Navidrome plugin writing to my own API and surface charts across time periods by querying the postgres database it writes to.
It's amazing to me that they have managed to stick around like they have. They're very much an "old internet" site, and I hope they can stick around for many many more years.
last.fm is one of those services that is from the pinnacle of the open web.
Huge opportunity to allow folk to own their own (meta)data. /fingerscrossed
17 year old me had no idea what I was getting into. It was the best and worst project I've ever worked on.
A lot of respect to the guys and girls still working on Last and I'm very excited to see where it goes from here.
[1] https://github.com/hummingme/scrobblescrubbler
I once used it for a long time, but that time was maybe 20 years ago now. I wasn't even sure what my username, password, or email address would have been -- but I had some guesses.
So I guessed a few times. I guessed wrong. The wrong guesses apparently blocked me, since the sign-up page now always goes 403 for me.
When I tried with my pocket supercomputer instead, the infection spread to its signature as well: It 403s there, too.
Fun times.
edit: Tried again. It didn't work yesterday or the couple of weeks prior. But it worked the first time today. So now I have a shiny new last.fm account with no history. :)
It has been maybe a decade since I met someone who actually uses the service.
Happy they are independent and allowing access to their API. Seems like it may be time to work on a personal project to track the data in a way that matters to me, rather than just what you normally get built in.
After going through the hula dance to open it anyway, it looks like it's working, but it sure doesn't look like it's received a lot of love recently.
But I don't know about for Mac & iOS.
That setting has been removed a few years ago. It now works the other way round: You authorise last.fm to access your Spotify data.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266875
At a glance, they're providing an interface to YT sourced content with some value adds around tracking or categorizing listening.
A quick question for users: can the site itself be configured as a listener without streaming / displaying the video? In general, YT has a lot of music, but the perf hit of streaming typically high-quality video as well is a blocker when doing dev work on my main machine.
Note that you do need to be a premium Spotify user for it to work. That's not needed for YouTube, so that explains why YouTube is the default.
Shameless plug: We run https://songstitch.art/ for collage generation.
> Your request was blocked
> To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe.
> Please try clearing your cookies and refreshing the page. > If the problem persists, try again later or on a different computer network.
> Error 406
edit: maybe they saw my message or fixed a bug? signup now works everywhere for me.
Back in the day, was heavily influenced by last.fm for this BBC 6music GWAP mooso.fm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2009/12/mooso.shtml
On Spotify I made a playlist with over 4,000 songs from Last FM. I remember doing it but I couldn't say how I did it now. And also a "loved" playlist which I am revisiting now. First track Whitest Boy Alive: Golden Cage, a stonker.
It's not anymore, right?
I really only ever used it so that a girl I liked would be able to see what I was listening to. She commented on my page. We ended up getting together for a few years. I miss my youth.
I wonder how they're going to position themselves now.
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.
Your request was blocked To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe.
Please try clearing your cookies and refreshing the page. If the problem persists, try again later or on a different computer network.
Error 406
:)
I think this is fantastic change and wish them the best, this is probably just a small hickup I experienced and I wil try again later.
BTW, I recently cancelled my youtube premium, it was just too expensive. Never was subscribed to Spotify, so I need different ways to listen to music.
These days, for auduiscrobbling, I recommend folks use either teal.fm (which alas is somewhat DIY or find-a-friend for their API service) or rocksky.app. There's a better credible exit, as it's based on atproto/Bluesky protocols, and a richer world of apps & interconnectivitiws emerging.
may it live a long life
Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web: 2002
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266875
Last.fm turns 20
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33722862
"The financial statements have been prepared on a going concern basis on the grounds that Paramount Global has confirmed that it will continue to provide financial and other support to Last. FM Limited at least for the next twelve months and thereafter for the foreseeable future to enable Last.FM Limited to continue to meet all its liabilities as they fall due."
I wonder what their financing plan is, and what shape this independence will take, whether Paramount is retaining a minority ownership take? Seems like they might just be able to scrape break even based on current revenue.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
Click “view PDF” for “Full accounts made up to 31 December 2024”.
i’m talking like 2000s
I’ve been telling close friend about this and then I see this verge article saying in not the only one https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/n...
Your request was blocked
To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe.