Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers

Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by woodruffw on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @10:39PM (#34606041)

I have three main sources of discovery now:

1. Last.fm: I've been scrobbling for years, and Last.fm is weirdly good about giving me recommendations I enjoy. I'd say ~80% of its "personalized homepage" recommendations hit the mark for me; I like that most are linked to YouTube so I can quickly confirm whether they're a good fit.

2. Bandcamp: I try to buy most my music via Bandcamp, and I use artists that I like to discover similar music/bands that they like. Subjectively this feels a little less fruitful than Last.fm, but it's definitely more expansive.

3. Social recommendations: I run a server that multiple friends use and upload to, and they tell me when they've added something new that they think I'll like. I also listen to an Internet radio stream run by friends, and I go to a lot of local shows.

By ratio, I think I probably get 50% of my new music through Last.fm, and then 25% each through Bandcamp and my social sphere.

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by RheingoldRiver on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @11:31PM (#34606382)

Don't take this in the wrong way, but how do you find last.fm usable anymore? Do you run noscript on it? Do you pay for it? I haven't been able to go there in like 5 years since they injected a billion ads and made your personal scrobble history practically unusable (you have to pay to search it????).

This thread has prompted me to export my history to csv since that's the only way I track what I listen to and I struggle a lot to remember the names of albums I like so I really want to be able to group & sort by playcount, and I miss the old last.fm so very, very, very much. But I absolutely will not pay for a site that ate my data for years and now holds it hostage (especially when I myself am the product).

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by woodruffw on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @11:35PM (#34606410)

No offense taken! I use uBlock and whatever else I have in my browser, plus I block a lot of things at the DNS level. So far that's left it moderately usable; the only part I really interact with is the index page, though, and occasionally checking my own profile to make sure I'm still scrobbling.

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by vanilla_nut on Wednesday February 01, 2023 @07:14AM (#34609459)

I love the idea of sharing a backend music server. I should give that a try!

Thanks for the idea.

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