Last.fm Users🎶

Technology
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Do you use it? Rate it? Hate it? Do you display your scrobbles on your website?

I made a last.fm account a few years ago (you can have a look at it here) & have found it useful for tracking what I’ve been listening to. I recently found out that you can set it up to scrobble music files you play using VLC, & setting that up was pretty quick and painless.

In that way last.fm offers an alternative to Spotify Wrapped, etc. But they themselves have corporate owners & I don’t know what their business model or business plan is.

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last.fm has a $3/month “pro” plan that provides more listening info than the free version. Not really worth it to me, but others might find it more valuable than I do. I’m not really consistent about scrobbling because not all of the playback tools I use play nicely with last.fm and that service’s owners aren’t paying me to care.

I haven’t bothered nuking my account because it isn’t really doing any harm. It’s been years since some OnlyFans bot tried to spam me there, for example.

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I really love scrobbling my music and have done so for a very long time, though there was a big jump there for the years I tried out streaming. My profile is here if you’re interested.

It’s a great service, but like you, I don’t necessarily trust that they’ll be available forever, and won’t get bought out, so I also scrobble to Libre.fm as well. That site was stagnant for a long time, but recently the developer has picked it back up and is working on it again.

I think some people also use ListenBrainz.org, which is similarly opensource. I’m not sure which is better between Libre or Listenbrainz, but they’re both free and have similar values.

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yes! i used to have a last.fm display on my site, but it’s down for the time being (i want to make it look nicer sometime, and javascript’s a bit messy to wrangle)

i love listenbrainz! there’s an option to sync your last.fm scrobbles with listenbrainz, which i use because scrobbling options for listenbrainz are a bit limited for what i use. something i love about listenbrainz is that you can link metadata to tracks—for example, if a song’s name is english on the streaming service you use but in a different language on musicbrainz (the database listenbrainz uses), you can link those two together so they’re recognized as the same song. the fact listenbrainz uses a community-built database rather than just taking what you throw at it is nice too, since different streaming services may have different metadata for the same song. super cool!

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I didn’t know about libre.fm! I may have to give that a go.

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I love last.fm because it means I don’t feel so left-out during Spotify Wrapped season, LMAO.

Do libre.fm and listenbrainz have graphs and such that you can use to see your listening habits? That’s sort of the main thing I’m using scrobbling at all for… I love data :)

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Libre.fm doesn’t…at least not yet, though they’ve hinted that they might be coming in the future.

Listenbrainz has a ton though, and they’re dedicated to staying open, so you should be able to download your data and manipulate it further if that’s what you want (I’ve never tried myself though).

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