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sthuck
pogue
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.
quirino
The best way to discover music nowadays is RateYourMusic. I go to an album I like, read a couple reviews to find like-minded people and check out their profiles. They often have lists with their favorite albums.
The album chart queries are also incredible. The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors so you can find exactly what you want.
smileson2
my method is just internet/local radio stations ( there are many ) and browsing the lineups at venues near me
simple, very little time investment required and avoids most modern fuckery
smrq
Audiotree has turned me on to several of my favorite bands as of late. Low hit rate (I probably only care for 5% of the music they feature at most) but those couple bands have been worth sifting through the rest.
PNewling
Shout out to KEXP!
bossyTeacher
> The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors
My problem with this is that it makes certain assumptions about the consistency of applying genres and about the very concept of genre which (imo) is more of a social construct than an empirical concept. It falls in the same category as religion-sect, language-dialect.
timonofathens
[dead]
postalcoder
what.cd was the world's greatest music discovery mechanism. You could always ask for recommendations in the forums or in the comment thread of the albums pages. The community always delivered. I miss that type of camaraderie. I also spent more on music as a member of that community than since it has been disbanded.
msy
What.cd was the Library of Alexandria for recorded music, the depth of what was collated and properly labelled there was far beyond anything that has ever existed on any other service, paid for or not. Every permutation of every release, endless live recordings, often multiple of the same event, absolutely incredible.
stuxnet79
Private trackers as I understand it, are still a thing in the mid 2020s. Did a replacement that matches (or surpasses) What.cd not pop up in the meantime?
I'm just wondering how a strong community like that was struck a deathblow. It's not like all of its content disappeared.
emsixteen
OiNK before that, too. Once waffles and what disappeared then I was never 'able' to get on to one of the newer ones… the whole process is some real archaic thing. Used to have a great 'profile' on those others, but yeah.
ldayley
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!
pogue
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...
soheilpro
Shameless plug: I'm building volt.fm for Spotify (3M users) which like last.fm lets you find people with similar taste.
You can even save their top songs as an auto-updating playlist. It's a great way to find new music that is not controlled by algorithms.
Here's my profile if anyone wants to have a look: https://volt.fm/soheilpro
cuu508
I've signed in and see my profile – how do I find people with similar taste?
bossyTeacher
> I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres.
This has been until very recently the modus operandi of most recommendation engine algorithms. If an algorithm is essentially doing what you do, would you not like that?
xvedejas
In my experience Spotify's song/playlist recommendations are not great, but the album recommendations have a pretty high hit rate. I'm not sure why this would be.
AlecSchueler
Did they get a lot better recently? For years I rarely even looked at them because they were so banal and repetitive, but about six months ago they suddenly became something to stay on top of.
xvedejas
I started using spotify about 5 years ago, if you're a long time user I don't really know what it was like before then.
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.
relaxing
Last.fm used to only update your listening stats on Friday, which turned into a fun event where everyone shared what they heard that week.
Eventually the stats became live updating and a bit of fun was lost.
Semaphor
I'm on a music discord server (for metal), most people share their weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly charts made from their last.fm data. Here's what I posted yesterday for my weekly: https://i.imgur.com/6jYS8jG.png
Daz912
>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.
Skill issue. you can export your listening history whenever you like.
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quirino
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.
kaizenb
I build a web app years ago with Spotify SDK to display top artists, songs, recents, also with a Discovery section that generates new music based on your history. You can create playlists from all sections. free @ https://echoesapp.io
quirino
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.
kaizenb
Just requested my data. They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?
Zambyte
Thanks for the tip. I just logged in to my Spotify account for the first time in years so I can export my data :)
twistslider
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 easy to build tools where a username alone is enough. That kind of lightweight social integration has mostly disappeared elsewhere.
Today, the social / community side is almost entirely just Discord. Nearly every music related server has a bot that displays Last.fm stats. My estimate is that abut 10% of Last.fm their users are also active in Discord music communities.
(Disclaimer: I run .fmbot, a Discord bot that integrates with Last.fm.)
joecool1029
> Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling.
That's not true. It's missing from Apple Music but present in Tidal, Deezer, and Quobuz. It also works well with Plex.
A large list from them: https://support.last.fm/t/more-ways-to-scrobble/192
twistslider
These integrations are lacking compared to Spotify. For example in Tidal you have to set it for each device where you install the app, and it doesn't work with things like casting. It's easy to forget to set it up which can cause gaps in your history.
The Plex integration gets pretty close to native, but it only scrobbles after a track is done, it doesn't have 'Now Playing' support.
As for Deezer and Quobuz I'm not sure. Afaik Spotify still stands alone by being set-and-forget, working on any device and having full feature support.
ilikehurdles
Qobuz works the same way. Set and forget. Don’t know about deezer.
moolcool
Missing last.fm support is the only thing keeping me from switching from Spotify to Apple Music
wyre
There are 3rd-party apps that have near seamless Apple Music integration, at least on MacOS (Scrobbles for Last.fm) and iPhone (Marvis).
twistslider
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
Amorymeltzer
Other recommendations in other siblings, but Neptunes on macOS and Finale on iOS are excellent. I only got into it a couple years ago, but aside from a few quirks, using those two has been super smooth and easy.
Semaphor
Could you use your fame to get last.fm to extend their API to allow listening number checks so it's not only people who registered with your bot? ;)
Also thanks for your work, while I dislike the spammyness of it, that's on the server owners (main server I'm on limits it to one bot channel)
twistslider
Last.fm isn't really expanding their API unfortunately. You can however see Last.fm stats in the main artist/album/track commands.
As for spammyness, I'm aware this is an issue. For non-bot channels I recommend using .togglecommand and enabling just a few specific commands, and setting a small embed mode so .fm commands don't take up too much space in chat.
squigz
Just one admin's opinion, but I think the bot spam thing is more a matter of server etiquette than anything. Sure, I'm all for #bot-spam channels, but nobody looks at those unless they're using it, so it's not very useful for things like sharing last.fm stats. I'd much rather people use it sensibly in a #music channel.
wantlotsofcurry
I love last.fm with all my being. I recently created a ListenBrainz (same org as MusicBrainz) account which is an open source alternative that you don’t have to host yourself. I’m scrobbling to both places now just in case.
Check out tapmusic.net too to make cool diagrams out of your scrobbled music.
Semaphor
I'm using selfhosted multi scrobbler [0] to scrobble to lfm, listenbrainz, and selfhosted koito [1].
Maybe not super useful, but fun ;) when at home, I scrobble to MS which distributes the data, when I have no VPN active on the go, I scrobble to last.fm only, which then gets used as source by MS as well, to redistribute it to the others.
jszymborski
libre.fm is also back at it!
F3nd0
Doesn't look like Tapmusic supports ListenBrainz; does it?
Then again, if all it does is collages, then ListenBrainz has a tool for that of its own.
Nannooskeeska
tapmusic.org is currently parked by GoDaddy. Looks like you meant tapmusic.net
dev_l1x_be
Also from this era and loosely related.
glitchcrab
Good lord, Oink was only around for 4 years? I was one of the earlier signups and it felt more like 10 years.
zukzuk
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.
rapfaria
There was. Oink spawned both wcd and waffles. wcd spawned a few including RED.
Next thursday, RED will have been around longer than WCD...
Semaphor
None of the successors captured oink for me (I proudly had their t-shirt), sadly.
huflungdung
[dead]
emsixteen
I miss it deeply.
cyrialize
I still use Last.fm! I've had it since 2008. It's really cool seeing how my music taste has changed, and seeing what I've come back to over and over again.
When I used to be much more active in online music communities I would post a 9x9 of my most listened to albums of the past week and discuss them.
ostwilkens
Still scrobbling since 2008. A lot of smaller artists used to upload their music to last.fm, and I found a lot of gems there (specifically in the swedish bitpop scene).
kevinfiol
Ha! I am still using Last.fm 21 years after first discovering it. I would say my current music taste is largely thanks to Last.fm and its compatibility and "Similar Artists" features.
tantalor
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.
hylaride
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.
PlunderBunny
iTunes Ping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
tantalor
> Launched September 1, 2010
A bit late to the party.
stuartmemo
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
pogue
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.
stuartmemo
Thanks! Good shout, will definitely add support for YouTube. Pandora, however, is sadly blocked in the UK.
undefined
doublepg23
They do? It's pretty limited but if you tap your profile photo at the bottom of Music and then tap your profile photo in the menu again it'll bring you to a "Apple Music profile" of sorts you can follow people with.
cobertos
I just moved my scrobbling to a self-hosted instance of Koito after switching from Spotify to Jellyfin. Very happy with the change, as I can still share all my music data with friends
xrd
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 bring that humanity with their choice of tracks. When they interview people it is so much more interesting as a companion to the music.
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. It was so interesting to find house music and be digging through the tastes of someone in London. And, then chatting with them, and discovering the live scenes, the people behind the music, etc. I loved that and nothing has ever replaced it.
Having said all this, I am interested in playing with "scrobbling." Anyone have any advice on how to get started? Do you need a music library? Is there a way to import your playlists from YouTube music? I'm not a spotify person.
acephal
> 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
erikig
Soulseek is still going?
I discovered so many artists, international variations of albums, live sessions and bootlegs from that app, it changed my relationship with music.
I have to go back and check it out.
crtasm
There's even a FOSS client now https://github.com/nicotine-plus/nicotine-plus
squigz
Soulseek is definitely still going, and absolutely still captures that feeling GP is talking about :)
Beyond that, and practically speaking, I find it the easiest way to find large, nicely organized discographies. And some not so nicely organized.
zimpenfish
> 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.)
AuthAuth
If you use streaming you can link it to lastfm or Listenbrainz(open source alternative). It will automagically scrobble your listening over.
Otherwise you need to find a music player that supports it or has a plugin to add the functionality. I use tauron for scrobbling my local listening.
staticshock
i used to use last.fm with winamp and the like. that needed scrobbling plugins. nowadays, i use it with spotify, and it's pretty simple: (1) make an account on last.fm. (2) go into spotify settings → social → connected apps, and add it in.
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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 recommend based on my profile. I got introduced to varied music, different genres and even a bit from different countries.
The worst was Pandora, which did recommendations based on breakdown of musical instruments and elements in the song. It did what it aimed to do pretty well, only it was a bad idea. It gave you a lot of uninspiring music that sounded like a bland copy of something you actually liked.
Spotify's recommendations are not super awful, but definitely feel closer to Pandora's style. I wonder why is the result like that even though I'm sure they train their model based on listening history.