Re:Last.fm is now independent
by ale on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:59AM
(#48296229)
Man i love last.fm even though it's been technically superseded (for most people) by Spotify's recommendation features. It just fit so well in the zeitgeist of 2000's indie scene, microblogs, early social media.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by wldcordeiro on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:32PM
(#48296715)
I don't think the recommendation engines behind Spotify, Youtube Music, etc compare to the recommendations I got from last.fm over the years. The algorithmic ones seem to have a bunch of issues that bug me as a long time music listener and someone with a large music library.
- 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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by Arubis on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:35PM
(#48297632)
That's because the recommendation engine that Last.fm used back in the day was made the incredibly expensive way: the entire corpus was hand-tagged and cross-linked by humans atop an enormous CDDB. Last.fm, Audioscrobbler, and MusicBrainz (the association engine) were all linked together.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by lonelyasacloud on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:21PM
(#48299175)
The recommendations engine used them but it's main strength was it was primarily based on collaborative filtering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm).
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by chickensong on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:46PM
(#48301792)
Is that even a problem? If someone consumes a lot of algorithmic recommendations and you don't, wouldn't that drift you farther apart in the last.fm relationship?
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by iamacyborg on Thursday May 28, 2026 @03:52AM
(#48305966)
If you really like Song X and Song X happens to be on a popular spotify playlist with a bunch of stuff you’re not into, you’ll start getting recommended all that other stuff on last.fm, no?
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by chickensong on Thursday May 28, 2026 @07:02AM
(#48307266)
Well, the current last.fm "play your recommendations" is linked to spotify, so maybe you're right? Last.fm has gone through phases of no streaming, streaming, and partner streaming, and TBH I haven't used last.fm as a stream source in quite a while. I guess it seems possible that if they outsource their recommendation playback to spotify, you'll get spotify recommendations.
Outside of the spotify integration, last.fm doesn't have visibility into anything that isn't scrobbled AFAIK. It's based on user data only. You have "neighbors" who have similar tastes, which I think is calculated based on overlapping scrobbles (not sure if time-weighted, or just top listens). If we both start scrobbling with a limited amount of artists, and 75% of our scrobbles are the band Primus, we're probably going to be neighbors. If I decide that Primus sucks and start listening to Coldplay all day, our venn diagram overlap separates and we're not neighbors anymore.
Maybe the neighbors influence the recommendations, but playback is outsourced to spotify? I guess I don't really know. You can still browse neighbors though, and use their top lists as "recommendations", which should only be based on listening history.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by xmprt on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:57PM
(#48297938)
But Spotify has that as well. Tons of user curated playlists. And although user playback data is harder to parse through, it's also pretty straightforward to build some clustering algorithm where if you both like X then you might like Y as well.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by hylaride on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:12PM
(#48299028)
My theory is that they don't have the incentive. Apple Genius was ridiculously good at music discovery, too. I shudder to think how much I spent on iTunes songs via genius over its run. But now that apple/spotify/etc get my monthly dollars either way, there's no huge incentive for them to create the discovery systems.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by steerpike on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:16PM
(#48302093)
Yeah. 100% agree here. The Pandora algorithm was an absolute breath of fresh air relative to every other recommendation system. Just constantly surfacing new and interesting music that I had never heard of but was exactly what I liked. I spent so long hunting for info on how they achieved it and if their taxonomies had ever been open sourced.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by Arubis on Thursday May 28, 2026 @08:35AM
(#48308044)
The Pandora algorithm -- and Pandora's positioning -- is truly a product of its time. You'll want to look into the Music Genome Project (whose very name dates it; the Human Genome Project finished in 2003), but equally influential was the big labels' stranglehold on legal music distribution. When Pandora started and for years of profitability, they had no deals with major record labels, instead promoting small indie artists on the basis of their recommendation engine. If they were going to survive, that engine had to be _excellent_.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by glenstein on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:06PM
(#48299821)
Great summaries. I also have a real affection for my last.fm discovery, and I think it had everything to do with "deep discovery" going deep into the related artists pages. It really shaped my relationship to music and my love of music discovery and I sometimes find I don't click with people whose idea of discovery is The Algorithm(TM).
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by dqv on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:56PM
(#48299692)
One really annoying example of YTM's algorithm is it (or whoever works on it) doesn't understand that a genre can have diverse sounds and instruments, so it will recommend songs that all sound the same.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by ClikeX on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:07PM
(#48301425)
One of the most infuriating things about recommendations engines is the way they handle non-English music. Maybe it's not with every language, but as soon as I listen to a Dutch song; the engines will recommend me ALL Dutch music, regardless of genre.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by heavensteeth on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:46PM
(#48303330)
> 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.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by mos_basik on Thursday May 28, 2026 @06:01PM
(#48316116)
You know what I didn't expect?
That I would so well internalize the "big brother is always watching what you click, what you hover, what you rewatch, what you comment on, what you pause to read longer than average, what you favorite, what you thumbs-down, etc" default experience provided by facebook/amazon/youtube/streaming platform/short form video platform/etc
that when I stick my head back into 4chan from time to time (to see what the motorcycle thread is talking about these days, or get idea for a show to watch) it's a like a physical weight lifts off me as I realize that no one and nothing gives a toss about what threads I open, or what posts I respond to, or what images I save or post. It won't change any feeds in opaque ways. It won't pollute my recommends (jokes aside about how how the choice of website already polluted matters enough). It won't do anything.
Blew my mind when I put my finger on what I was feeling and realized how pervasive this sort of thing has gotten in most every big tech online product.
I've tried to switch to Spotify from Apple Music a few times because the common wisdom seems to be that Spotify has better algorithmic recommendations. But Apple Music "knows" what I like already, and Spotify never grabs me so fast that I'm willing to stick around for weeks training it -- and I suspect part of that is all of Apple Music's human-made playlists. Apple Music has hired a lot of good editors/curators over the years, and I haven't found any service -- including audiophile darlings Qobuz and Tidal -- that beats it in that aspect.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by sailfast on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:09PM
(#48298138)
For me curation was better but I was really missing the ability to quickly seed a playlist with a specific vibe and build from there for specific moods.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by zero_bias on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:04PM
(#48297168)
Cannot call lastfm algorithm advanced in any sense. Just opened Amon Tobin page: "similar artists: Kid Koala and DJ Kush", which is an impressively shallow understanding of the last 20 (!!) years of his life, and this happened with almost every artist on the platform, because the average sum of tastes of every listener does not exist in reality. E.g. in the case of Amon Tobin, Kid Koala is the average of similarities between early albums and recent releases, which is just not true, his music cannot be averaged throughout his career. I love my Web 2.0 youth, but the average similarity algorithm doesnt deserve praise. Its not better, its nostalgia and lack of faang-style unlimited greed which confused with better quality
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
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by srfwx on Saturday May 30, 2026 @02:46PM
(#48339439)
I am unfortunately a bit late to this conversation but I've been building a music exploration website in my spare time, which has similar artist recommendations too.
https://explore.band
Still work in progress but curious to know what you think if you get a chance to try it
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by zero_bias on Sunday May 31, 2026 @11:51PM
(#48352419)
Checked with vast Amon Tobin discography with all his aliases as his discography is a very complicated edge case for any recommendation algorithm: Stone Giants/Figueroa is listened by people who like Amon Tobin but the former is pure indie rock and folk and should not show Amon Tobin itself but more something like Current93.
Don’t know how to solve this issue but it but it break any recommendation algorithm for last 20 years
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by AlexandrB on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:39PM
(#48296800)
I'm 90% sure that music labels pay to "put their thumbs on the scales" with these recommendation algorithms in order to push their "hot" artists. I wonder how many of these problems are a result of that.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by bonesss on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:39PM
(#48297669)
Personally I’m more suspicious of “classic” artists, where the royalty and songwriting picture might be very skewed behind the scenes. The corporate owners of Spotify favouring one catalog of, say, “70s music” versus another could lead to a long-term capture of that category with little reaction or awareness.
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).
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by komali2 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:45PM
(#48296885)
We can never know for sure if this is or isn't the case, so our only hope for stuff we can be confident isn't this way is with foss / self host able solutions
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by efreak on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:48PM
(#48301217)
Spotify was advised of payola scheme in federal court in the US, unfortunately last month the judge ruled that the TOS prevention of lawsuits against Spotify is legal.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by naravara on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:20PM
(#48297410)
The other frustration I’ve noticed is that they key in very heavily on artist and specific “genre” designation as what feeds the recommendation, which is actually quite bad for anyone who likes experimental work.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by autoexec on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:34PM
(#48298484)
> 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 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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by alejoar on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:17PM
(#48296499)
I just think it's beautiful that I can see all the music I've listened to since 2005 (back when it was still called Audioscrobbler, before the Last.fm rename). And I never stopped scrobbling in all that time!
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by bool3max on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:39PM
(#48299459)
I love clicking on a random person's profile and seeing that they're actively using the account (as in, I can see they're currently listening to a specific song!) they've had for 20+ years. So cool.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by apocalyptic0n3 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:29PM
(#48297539)
I second this. I started as an Audioscrobbler user before the Last.fm merger. I have tracked nearly every track I've listened to for 21 years. It's awesome seeing how my habits have changed over the years.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by wyclif on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:37PM
(#48296769)
As a long-time user, I do enjoy seeing how my tastes have changed over the years and which artists and albums I play the most. I also tend to agree that the Last.fm recommendation engine was perfectly fine for my use case compared to the algo that Spotify uses now. https://www.last.fm/user/wyclif
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by tclancy on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:52PM
(#48296988)
Same. I have one or more gaps in there which I wish I could go back and correct. I feel like integration with the service is a must for any music thing I pick up, the most recent being this year, resurrecting my old iTunes library via Navidrome.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by bool3max on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:38PM
(#48299441)
For me last.fm's value lies in the community aspect: you can leave a comment on any artist, album, or individual track's page. There's not a single other place on the internet where I can go to to see what the people think of a song I'm listening to at any given moment (apart from perhaps YouTube, but we all know what the comments there are like - last.fm attracts a more sophisticated crowd by nature).
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by ilikegreen on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:42PM
(#48300346)
I think RateYourMusic also allows for commenting pretty much on everything (and it also extends to film and, IIRC, videogames).
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by bool3max on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:22PM
(#48300911)
For me it doesn't really compare: with Last.FM all I've gotta do is navigate to my profile and the song I'm _currently_ playing on Spotify is right at the top, I just click it and boom, I'm on the track's page.
Besides, you can't leave comments under specific tracks on RYM.
> I hope Sonemnic (?) doesn't drive it to the ground.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by al_borland on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:00PM
(#48297995)
I’ve completely given up on recommendation engines from streaming services. It feels like they’re only good for creating background noise, not for helping me find music I actually want to listen to.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by swatcoder on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:31PM
(#48296697)
More than a feeling.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by rrix2 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:48PM
(#48296928)
The sad thing is that before Spotify bought the Echo Nest[1], they had hosted some of the coolest discovery demos for non-mainstream (in my case ambient/IDM) where you would feed it a youtube video URL and it would make a really compelling radio playlist based off it. i found so many artists i still listen to today by just sticking a video in there in the morning and coming back to the tab when something incredible popped up.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by whywhywhywhy on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:10PM
(#48297265)
> over time for non-mainstream users because the some limited number of mainstream modes dominate as most statistically "optimal" across the total user pool
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by wldcordeiro on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:03PM
(#48297152)
Absolutely, you're hitting the same conclusions I've reached. The algorithms are optimized for the lowest friction users that just replay the same music they like over and over again and accept whatever the popular music is. If you're a user that likes music discovery you're fighting against the system to get what you want.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by chickensong on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:14PM
(#48302068)
I don't really go for any of the spotify recommendations or algorithmic playlists, but I have great success with the weekly Release Radar playlist.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by mjr00 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:08PM
(#48296355)
Yep, member since May 21 2005 here, still scrobbling with Spotify. Don't think I've ever used any of the radio features on the site, really; even back in the 00s all I used were the WinAmp/Foobar plug-ins.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by comboy on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:54PM
(#48297008)
Spotify recommendations are biased because user incentive and theirs don't align. They pay different royalties to different artists, they optimize earnings. Also, they take money to promote music and shove it down your throat.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by SwellJoe on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:07PM
(#48302960)
And, they're starting to push AI music into recommendations, as well. Their incentives are not aligned with users or artists. The major labels were previously pretty OK with the situation, as they had a negotiating advantage against indies and could get better deals for their catalog, but I guess they'll come to regret that deal with the devil.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by TZubiri on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:12PM
(#48299921)
The advantage of last.fm is that it doesn't host the content, so it doesn't shape the music you listen to like using Netflix would shape the content you watch, it's content neutral.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by jghn on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:31PM
(#48298459)
One problem for me with Spotify and similar is that I don't use them. I want to be able to track what I've listened to but I only use my own, personal library via iTunes, not Apple Music.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by chrsw on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:35PM
(#48298499)
I loved how easy it was to scrobble from different music services. Haven't used it in years though so I have no idea if that's still the case. Stuff like that usually rots because it's not making someone money.
I’m proud to say that I’m still using it, connected through Spotify! 23 years and counting, and it pretty much captured 100% of my listening activity. It’s a gimmick, but a nice gimmick to have and to be able to look up my music taste over time.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by _AzMoo on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:12PM
(#48302039)
I find the current recommendations from spotify or youtube music don't actually help me find new music very well. They just end up shoehorning me, instead of widening my options.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by quirino on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:22PM
(#48296567)
last.fm is one of my very favorite services. It's rough around the edges in some parts, but I've gotten incredible value from it. A couple of websites built on it that I check out from time to time:
- 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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by quirino on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:39PM
(#48296793)
If you're a Spotify user, you can get even more precise data by downloading your listening data. The website I linked gets data from MusicBrainz and tries to fill in the gaps with an average, but even then it gets some things wrong.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by BoorishBears on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @08:07PM
(#48302500)
Just this weekend I generated a really detailed breakdown from my Spotify dump, it's unfortunate they hide so much of the interesting stuff in a dump that takes a week+ to get access to: https://6fce3ff2.spotifyguy94-dashboard.pages.dev
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
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by tclancy on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:01PM
(#48297117)
The middle one is fascinating. The first track I ever scrobbled is by an artist I have yet to listen to again in 22 years. Much of the longest gaps is taken up by bands I found or started to like due to Rock Band which came out around that time. Man I miss that too, we had 30 or 40 people over right after it came out and turned the house into a karaoke dive, right down to having to kick them off the couch the next morning.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by dateutli on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:07PM
(#48298968)
Happy to see they mentioned their API usage won't change. Last year I was working on a small project (https://listeningfacts.com) around spotify's API but they decided to suddenly restrict access to it.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by lawlesst on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:22PM
(#48299197)
I've had the same experience. Spotify abruptly deprecated their recommendations API endpoint (https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/spot...). I recently switched to last.fm and am able to generate recommendations via their API just fine and without being a pro subscriber.
I also had the delight of finding my streams from 2008 still in my history after not logging in for several years.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by superkuh on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:19PM
(#48300027)
It was such a hassle exporting my data from last.fm to libre.fm when they were bought out in 2007 (and then all the founders left in 2009). But I'm glad I did it. While it's nice that last.fm is "independent" now, they're still for-profit and probably should be avoided.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by elAhmo on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:10PM
(#48299874)
Is anyone using last.fm in 2026? This made sense when people were playing MP3s in their Windows Media Player or Winamp, but as 99% of the people just stream music now, what is the purpose of this service?
It has been maybe a decade since I met someone who actually uses the service.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by antinomicus on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:18PM
(#48300009)
I can’t stand streaming and wanted to get off all streaming services and now self host every single piece of my digital media. Last.fm is an important component for the music side of my services in order to use the last.fm api to track listens and provide recommendations.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by dhruvmittal on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:25PM
(#48300116)
I really enjoy having almost 2 decades of my music listening history to play with + I use a couple different streaming services as well as vinyl and local playback, so it's nice to see my overall habits.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by thesuitonym on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @04:31PM
(#48300209)
I still listen to the majority of my music as downloaded MP3s, but no, I do not use Last.FM anymore. I've become much more wary of being tracked and have no desire to give them information for free, much less pay for the privilege!
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by aembleton on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:56PM
(#48301311)
I still use it. I use the Pulsar music player on Android which has an Audioscrobbler built in. I have my entire mp3/flac collection extra compressed into opus files, so that my 120GB of music is only taking up 43GB on my phone. When I'm listening in the car or on the train I really can't tell the drop in quality.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by themafia on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:19PM
(#48299129)
Purchased and then completely ignored.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by heldrida on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:13PM
(#48296430)
Last.fm used to be special, but this was a long time ago. Just tried to login, recovered the password and seems that its just a tracker nowadays. In the past I could listen to music and drop a comment, meet new people, etc.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by aurmc on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:25PM
(#48296599)
It still has comments on albums/songs/artists, but most of the conversations are a bit dead.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by forgotmypw17 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:07PM
(#48298112)
I tried to log in, and I remembered my password, but it forced me to do an email reset anyway. I no longer have that domain/email, so I guess my data and access are lost also. Shame.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by verelo on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:19PM
(#48296524)
Came here to say the same. I don't even know what this product is anymore. The website makes it sound like its about music but there is no music? I'm lost.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by SyneRyder on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:37PM
(#48298525)
Among the people I know still using Last.FM, it's somewhere between having statistics about your music, and a recommendation engine. It isn't about playing the music, you can do that elsewhere. But by having data on every single piece of music you've listened to, it can recommend music you will like, and potentially recommend people with shared musical tastes as well. There's a feature to compare your musical compatibility with others.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by SyneRyder on Thursday May 28, 2026 @01:27AM
(#48304943)
I hadn't back around 2008 when Last.FM made the recommendation, nor do I think I'd made the connection with Film Boards Of Canada even though we watched those films in my primary school years during class time.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by heldrida on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:26PM
(#48296625)
Originally, it kind of worked like radio; it curated music for you, you could like, comment or skip tracks. It'd reinforce the algorithm, and you'd start finding great artists. I liked the Blues catalogue a lot, even though I was listening to reggae, ska, punk, etc. It just seemed they had the best music catalogue. I remember checking how big the catalogue was, comparatively with others, which was much smaller, but much, much better!
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by zkxjzmswkwl1 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:47PM
(#48299567)
Many many years ago I wrote a small platform to serve as an off-ramp for Last users. They had just been acquired and it wasn't going over super well with users. "What I listen to" (coworker suggested the name), shortened to wilt.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by progmetaldev on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:38PM
(#48299437)
I'm glad I kept using an Audioscrobbler since 2008. Right now I have it hooked up to Spotify, but I've used one with foobar2000 for non-streaming, and have found other players to have the functionality for the most part (at least the ones I've made use of). I even had an extension for Chrome and Firefox that would send the data from YouTube's website when I used to listen to music on there.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by jaimie on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:15PM
(#48296467)
I still use last.fm via Spotify. It is wild to see my entire listening history from 11th grade to present (20 years!). Always fun to poke through and see changes from one year or life phase to the next.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by thinkdecidedo on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:14PM
(#48299057)
Wow, I hope this is good news! I'm in my 21st year of scrobbling and still so obsessed with the stats. Just recently, I built a browser extension [1] to make batch editing more convenient and to get even more data about my scrobbles.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by 4diii on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:10PM
(#48303974)
Sleeve on MacOS, last.fm app on iOS (have to manually check for new scrobbles every so often and it only counts songs from your library) and a web extension scrobbler for when I’m on Linux using the web version.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by HeckFeck on Thursday May 28, 2026 @06:34PM
(#48316480)
I wish Apple Music would support scrobbling to the Last.FM API like Spotify, but to get the ball rolling we'd need someone on the Apple Music team who can nudge it up the list.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by donatj on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:13PM
(#48297311)
I love Last.fm, I've been scrobbling for over 20 years now.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by Semaphor on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:42PM
(#48296843)
Another alternative is listenbrainz [0], which is also self-hostable [1]. A smaller, lightweight, single user selfhostable alternative, and more about just the stats is Koito [2], and finally because obviously you want to scrobble everywhere at once, you can self-host Multi Scrobbler to scrobble to and from multiple sources at once. Yes, I like scrobbling ;)
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by mariusor on Thursday May 28, 2026 @03:37AM
(#48305856)
Lol, I had no idea scrobbling was popular again. I'm the maintainer of a scrobbler daemon for linux that gets the track info through MPRIS and can send it to last.fm, listenbrainz and libre.fm. :)
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by solarkraft on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:20PM
(#48298289)
Congratulations (I guess), but what does “independent” mean here? Who bought it from whom (and why)? Is it employee owned now? Is it transitioning to a foundation?
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by oflannabhra on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:33PM
(#48296721)
one of the very first programming projects I took on was to figure out how to scrobble the records that I was playing. It was my first exposure to so many things: Ruby, FFIs, audio processing, audio fingerprinting (I think I used echo nest ?). Ended up going to local meetups to ask for advice.
last.fm is one of those services that is from the pinnacle of the open web.
Congratulations to last.fm on this, although I'm not sure what I can do that actually "scrobbles" at this point. I went to their download page for the Mac desktop app, which somewhat forebodingly referred to "what you've been playing in iTunes" rather than Apple Music, and downloaded it anyway. It's an Intel-only app, not universal, and it doesn't appear to be signed, so macOS Tahoe screams about it being possible malware.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by SyneRyder on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:28PM
(#48298405)
Spotify scrobbles to Last.FM (it's built-in to Spotify as a setting somewhere, from memory). On Windows, MusicBee will scrobble everything you play through it. On Android, the Last.FM app can watch playback notifications of Android music apps that you select and scrobble those - the app itself doesn't have to have Last.FM support.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by cdrnsf on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:17PM
(#48296505)
There's still a ton of value in the historical recommendations on last.fm's site. What its future looks like, I'm not sure. I'd love to know who is going to operate it now that it is independent.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by pdxandi on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:39PM
(#48298555)
This is great news! I worked on the redesign and replatform with last.fm when they were part CBS Interactive. They were a lovely team of engineers and designers who cared about their product, and I appreciated their culture. Fun memories spending time in London with the team. Glad to hear they found a new home!
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by NiloCK on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:19PM
(#48297391)
I'm mostly unfamiliar with the current offering of last.fm, but the name is familiar from way back. Glad to see something well-liked reclaim some independence.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by esskay on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:40PM
(#48296808)
Downside of it is like all Metabrainz projects they seem to intentionally go and make everything as utterly ugly as possible. It feels like someone there intentionally thinks up ways to make the worst UX possible.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by beardyw on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:12PM
(#48297288)
Me too. I tried loggin in, and after a forced password reset I am back, though back to 2018 it turns out.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by kevinwang on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:28PM
(#48296647)
I hope that means it will improve now. There's such a rich space of features that they could do. Had some hope with their experimental Labs but I remember being underwhelmed and not seeing anything about it recently.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by bachmeier on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:12PM
(#48298190)
No idea what last.fm is. Clicked the logo at the top of the forum, but that's one of those prank links that takes you to the page you're already on. Typed in last.fm manually and got
Your request was blocked
To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by attilagyorffy on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:03PM
(#48296280)
This is very exciting. The music landscape is just as chaotic as it was back in 2007 (when CBS acquired Last.fm) if not even more complex these days. Can't wait to see what's next. <3
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by zero_bias on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:25PM
(#48297492)
So lastfm become relevant again because slop will not appear statistically in user scrobblings because of vast amount of "musicians" required to be profitable: if I listen to 1000 AI artists with one track produced and Linkin Park then my average will be Linkin Park
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by larrykubin on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:26PM
(#48296627)
I have a history going back to 2012, which is great. I've always worried Spotify would stop working with last.fm, I wonder if this makes it more or less likely.
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 think Last.fm might have been a better friend finding and dating app than any of its contemporaries or anything that came after. Seems like everyone in this thread or anyone I know IRL has a story of making a good connection with someone via it. I know I'll always cherish the people I got to know on there.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by Semaphor on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:49PM
(#48296937)
Sitting at 239,447, next to no scrobbling from 2017-2022, and I deleted my old account because of a piracy panic, so nothing before 2008. https://www.last.fm/user/YoshiSlen
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by Scene_Cast2 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:01PM
(#48296257)
I remember Last.fm's value proposition was 1) discovery and 2) community. (1) is (mostly, for most people) covered by "feed" algorithms of Spotify and YouTube.
I wonder how they're going to position themselves now.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by AdmiralAsshat on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:45PM
(#48296881)
As someone who used to hang out on various music forums...a human recommendation based on careful analysis of your last.fm scrobbles was infinitely more useful and accurate than anything Pandora/YouTube/Spotify/Tidal ever recommended me. Humans can infer not just what you like, but what you don't like.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by TFNA on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:55PM
(#48297020)
Community largely died out already by 2012. Originally Last.fm enabled a lot of IRL socializing, connecting hipsters who lived in the same town and listened to the same music. Changes in music-listening habits, the atomization of tastes in a world where so much was available, and CBS not having a clue what to do with the site -- that killed Last.fm except for just a way to track one's own plays.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by kgwxd on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @03:00PM
(#48298878)
Clicked join: "Your request was blocked. To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe."
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.
Last.fm & in particular audioscrobbling has been such an amazing joy to have in the world. Music is so important to me, and it's amazing having this system to help see over time what friends and I myself enjoy.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by fontain on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:15PM
(#48296478)
"The company has generated an operating loss for the year to 31 December 2024 of £690,252 (2023: profit of £1,509,544) and revenue of £2,215,381 (2023: £1,960,340). As at 31 December 2024, net liabilities were £45,506,488 (2023: £44,855,202)."
"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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by paul7986 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:39PM
(#48296797)
Anyone else music listening habits change in the past six months to listening to one owns AI Slop? My slop (been a real hobby songwriter of melodies & lyrics since a kid..decades ago) has the most meaning to me it’s just not me singing. Now it sounds pro and some ppl when I’m playing it actually like it vs. my own rough demos (guitar, vocal and added drums/bass via GarageBand). I actually don’t care if others hear my slop as it’s all my own ideas…words and melodies which have way more meaning then Listening to another’s music/songs.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by ssl-3 on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:31PM
(#48301025)
The last time it was mentioned here, perhaps a couple of weeks ago, I tried to warm up my old last.fm account.
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. :)
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by HeckFeck on Thursday May 28, 2026 @06:38PM
(#48316530)
Get in touch with LFM support, it's good. I hadn't used my LFM since 2011, but I remembered my old email address that was likely used with the account. I emailed support asking them kindly to reset my password to my new email, and they obliged.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by ssl-3 on Thursday May 28, 2026 @10:48PM
(#48318397)
Sorry to reply twice. My previous reply is too old to edit.
I looked for contact info, but https://www.last.fm/about/contact only lists one email address and says not to use that for tech support. It says to use support.lastfm.com -- a forum -- for technical questions.
But I'm pretty unwilling to throw a bunch account data, even if it's already public and already very old, into one place for the bots to hoover up, ruminate upon, correlate, and then keep track of until the earth cools.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by HeckFeck on Friday May 29, 2026 @06:44AM
(#48321428)
I've found the support email address. It might still be open for support queries. If you send me an email I'll send you what I know. My email address is in my profile.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by ryanmcbride on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:38PM
(#48301096)
I've used last.fm since the beginning and I still use it to scrobble. I hope it goes back to the more open api and the ability to more freely customize the profile pages like was possible back before last.fm 2.0 or whatever it was when they massively overhauled everything.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by smurda on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:08PM
(#48301441)
I love last.fm but never understood the URL structure naming convention. Why use a "+" instead of a "-" for every band page (e.g. https://www.last.fm/music/The+Beatles).
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?
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by kevinsync on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:15PM
(#48301515)
I suspect it was an intentional choice so that artist names like Jay-Z remain properly separated in the URL, especially in cases of multiple-artist billings (ex. https://www.last.fm/music/Nas+&+Jay-Z)
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by kubanczyk on Thursday May 28, 2026 @02:30AM
(#48305376)
I've checked RFC 1738 and it's not the case. The only standard for "+" is:
> (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).
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by zimpenfish on Thursday May 28, 2026 @10:35AM
(#48309544)
RFC1738 is obsolete. RFC1866, referenced in that SO answer, is also obsolete.
But none of that matters, particularly, because lastfm are consuming the URLs, they know full well what "+" means in a URL submitted to their servers, and also they've been around for decades (well before the whole "use %20 instead") - why on earth would they change up their URL scheme when it's working fine?
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by herewulf on Thursday May 28, 2026 @04:38PM
(#48315133)
The "-" character appears pretty frequently in song/album titles, maybe even artist names. There could be some sense in not using it as a substitute for space in this context.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by basisword on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:13PM
(#48301484)
Wish I'd kept using my last.fm account. It's a shame that although Apple + Spotify both allow you to download your full listening history you can't upload it (and keep dates/times) to fill out your historical data. I'd start using it in a heartbeat again if they allowed that.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by msephton on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:56PM
(#48301884)
Long may it continue. I've used Last.fm since it launched to keep track of my listening habits (albeit incomplete since iPhone) and all the gigs I've ever been to (complete to the best of my knowledge!).
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by pyk on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @08:46PM
(#48302789)
This is pretty amazing, I have been scrobblin’ for 23 years (pre-rename from audioscrobbler to last.fm), from Winamp and foobar2000 to iTunes to Spotify over the years - amazing to see them continue this service for the dedicated music lovers. One of the few services spanning decades of analytics - excited for the team!
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by murlax on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:31PM
(#48304149)
What a blast from the past! I met my ex-girlfriend from half-way across the globe on last.fm. Lots of fond memories of sharing music on this lovely platform.
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.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by ultrasandwich on Thursday May 28, 2026 @02:07AM
(#48305211)
Last.fm is my favorite service I've ever used, period. Been using it since the early days, met real people through its comments section, and generally never had complaints about the quality of recommendations, etc.
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!
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by oscarcp on Thursday May 28, 2026 @04:22AM
(#48306180)
shame I cant recover my original account. When they sold to spotify I hadn't accessed my account for a good while so they just moved everything over and deleted it. It was a shame, I'm one of the OGs that signed up when it still was audioscrobbler, 23 years of historic listening data through the drain. Shame. (did i mention it is a shame? XD)
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by aeontech on Thursday May 28, 2026 @02:05PM
(#48312973)
Time to revive my account... (scrobbling since 2003, heh) - started in audioscrobbler days, before last.fm
My usage has gone way down since switching to streaming services, this made me search for ways to backfill the data...
For anyone using Apple Music, looks like you can request an export of your data from privacy.apple.com, then use https://github.com/nerveband/Apple-Music-Play-History-Conver... to convert it for Last.fm import (haven't tried it yet, but looks promising).
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by HeckFeck on Thursday May 28, 2026 @06:32PM
(#48316467)
Would be nice but it can't be done. I stopped scrobbling in 2011, then found out the site was still alive in 2024, one email to support later and I was back in.
I wanted to import my Spotify listening history from the intervening years, but found that the LFM API limits scrobbles to no earlier than two weeks ago. A shame, because my current listening history is now very skewed between the two "eras".
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by czottmann on Thursday May 28, 2026 @05:35PM
(#48315848)
Excellent timing. I am currently working on a macOS scrobbler that (also) works with Last.fm, and supports music recogs from iOS, Apple Watch, and macOS.
Re:Last.fm is now independent
by HeckFeck on Friday May 29, 2026 @06:59AM
(#48321547)
Wild shot - but I wonder whether the newly emancipated Last.FM are looking to hire? I've loved the site since I got my old account back in 2024. Recently I created a fun widget maker using its API:
- 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.
The problem will be recovering from algorithmic poisoning from folks just scrobbling from spotify
Outside of the spotify integration, last.fm doesn't have visibility into anything that isn't scrobbled AFAIK. It's based on user data only. You have "neighbors" who have similar tastes, which I think is calculated based on overlapping scrobbles (not sure if time-weighted, or just top listens). If we both start scrobbling with a limited amount of artists, and 75% of our scrobbles are the band Primus, we're probably going to be neighbors. If I decide that Primus sucks and start listening to Coldplay all day, our venn diagram overlap separates and we're not neighbors anymore.
Maybe the neighbors influence the recommendations, but playback is outsourced to spotify? I guess I don't really know. You can still browse neighbors though, and use their top lists as "recommendations", which should only be based on listening history.
Sadly many years ago pandora bacame US only, so I couldnt use it (did not bother with VPN).
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.
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.
That I would so well internalize the "big brother is always watching what you click, what you hover, what you rewatch, what you comment on, what you pause to read longer than average, what you favorite, what you thumbs-down, etc" default experience provided by facebook/amazon/youtube/streaming platform/short form video platform/etc
that when I stick my head back into 4chan from time to time (to see what the motorcycle thread is talking about these days, or get idea for a show to watch) it's a like a physical weight lifts off me as I realize that no one and nothing gives a toss about what threads I open, or what posts I respond to, or what images I save or post. It won't change any feeds in opaque ways. It won't pollute my recommends (jokes aside about how how the choice of website already polluted matters enough). It won't do anything.
Blew my mind when I put my finger on what I was feeling and realized how pervasive this sort of thing has gotten in most every big tech online product.
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.
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
But very nice ui, looks smooth and useful
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.
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.
- 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
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.
It has been maybe a decade since I met someone who actually uses the service.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://github.com/hummingme/scrobblescrubbler
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.
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.
[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
Huge opportunity to allow folk to own their own (meta)data. /fingerscrossed
last.fm is one of those services that is from the pinnacle of the open web.
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.
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 not anymore, right?
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.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266875
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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
may it live a long life
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.
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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.
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.
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”.
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:)
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.
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...
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. :)
I looked for contact info, but https://www.last.fm/about/contact only lists one email address and says not to use that for tech support. It says to use support.lastfm.com -- a forum -- for technical questions.
But I'm pretty unwilling to throw a bunch account data, even if it's already public and already very old, into one place for the bots to hoover up, ruminate upon, correlate, and then keep track of until the earth cools.
Any tips on proceeding?
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
But none of that matters, particularly, because lastfm are consuming the URLs, they know full well what "+" means in a URL submitted to their servers, and also they've been around for decades (well before the whole "use %20 instead") - why on earth would they change up their URL scheme when it's working fine?
Shameless plug: We run https://songstitch.art/ for collage generation.
i’m talking like 2000s
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.
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!
My usage has gone way down since switching to streaming services, this made me search for ways to backfill the data...
For anyone using Apple Music, looks like you can request an export of your data from privacy.apple.com, then use https://github.com/nerveband/Apple-Music-Play-History-Conver... to convert it for Last.fm import (haven't tried it yet, but looks promising).
I wanted to import my Spotify listening history from the intervening years, but found that the LFM API limits scrobbles to no earlier than two weeks ago. A shame, because my current listening history is now very skewed between the two "eras".
https://actions.work/listening-post
(AFAIK, the official Mac scrobbler is dead by now.)
https://github.com/lordfeck/last.played/
If any of the team wants to reach me, my email is in my profile.