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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Orpheus and Redacted existed but it's kind of hard to beat the convenience of streaming for the low price in 2025.
Granted you can set up automated *arr systems with PLEXAMP to get a pretty seamless "personal Spotify" setup IME getting true usefulness out of trackers of What's quality always required spending real money - to obtain rare records/CDs on marketplaces - or at least large amounts of time if you went the "rent CDs from the library" route. I personally haven't ran into much RYM releases lacking on Apple Music and what is lacking I can find on Bandcamp or YouTube.
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!
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...
So, all I’m hearing is that, when we actually took the humans out of the loop and replaced them with algorithms, all the humanity disappeared?
”If take human out … why human there no more???”
It’s shocking this species is able to come up with such advanced technologies when the above is the existential question that plagues them in the macro.
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.
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.
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
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.
> They have noted "Preparation time 30 days" :/ What takes so long?
There's probably one person nursing some horrific bogslop software that frequently breaks but absolutely cannot be rewritten or changed (because it was someone's pet project) and frequently has to be manually twizzled to get things out of what is probably a hostile data retrieval environment and they're just TIRED and that's why there's a 30 day leeway because otherwise the Data Retrieval Goblin would be way over the line of overwhelmed rather than just under it all the time.
Probably.
(I realise I've likely described a significant percentage of companies there.)
Earlier this year I decided to move away from streaming platforms and rebuild my local music collection and serve it out over Plex. Plex supports last.fm so everything gets recorded there.
I also use the following docker containers on my home server:
This allows me to share my last.fm input to both a local scrobbler (Koito) and to listenbrainz - I figured having this data in multiple locations makes it a bit more safe.
Honestly between last.fm and listenbrainz I find myself exploring more on listenbrainz - even though most of it's users don't really fit the same listening profile I do.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
Been scrobbling since 2008. I found out what last.fm was thanks to installing Rockbox on my iPod nano, and seeing they had this "scrobbling" feature. Had to remember to plug in the iPod, pull the scrobble log and upload it using a website someone created.
Last.fm was probably my first social network, although it probably doesn't make it justice to call it that! I am still scrobbling after so many years! Loved this article. Really good memories... Thx for sharing
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
https://listenbrainz.org/ is an open source scrobbler, with the advantage that it leverages the musicbrainz database and connects listens to artist and track IDs instead of names, avoiding duplicate confusion. You can keep last.fm and submit to both of you like.
I'd stopped scrobbling like 10 years ago, but recently got into it again.
My 16yo son discovered Last.fm and scrobblibg and got me to install the Jellyfin scrobbler plugin. And I recovered my old account! I got some boomer music jokes from him, but it was worth it.
I miss the old last.fm. I know it's still there, but it's not the same since CBS took over and made everything rely on youtube or whatever it's doing these days.
I still use last.fm. Been continously scrobbling since 2004. I also export my last.fm and Spotify listening history every now and again just in case. I plan to one day make a timeline of my listens overlayed on top of world and personal events.
I made friends I still have by browsing people who had a compatible music taste to me and then reaching out to chat.
The thing with data is that you have to act on it for it to be useful, and this data is useful only to recommendation engineers. Spotify's end-of-year summary is more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.
Silly curiosity - what's that "BEAM-appreciator" in that bio? I could only think of a protein brand name (that too not from my geography) shortened as BEAM :/
Sep 23, 2004 here! 285k scrobbles. Always been a loyal user. My use goes back far enough that I would have scrobbles queued up for when my dialup connection came online to push the days’ missed scrobbles up.
I filed my collaborative filtering patent in 1995, describing the core basic way that your “desert island 5 favorite albums”, and the 5 favorites list from many other people, could be used to recommend music you would like. The patent is a nice tutorial on how it is done, check it out here if you’d like:
Yeah yeah it was a software patent. If that bugs you, you can take solace in the fact that I blew it executing on monetizing it. Microsoft ended up owning it and I went on to other adventures.
I worked at Last.fm from 2007 to 2012. The MIR team (think: research) developed a wonderful system called "RadioQL", which allowed you to stitch together custom ratio stations from any of a huge host of factors, joined together by AND, OR, and NOT. You could select artist radios, song radios, tags, and so on, but also combine this with things like the BPM or even some sentiment analysis. It was used a little bit inside some public-facing radio stations, but nobody outside of the staff ever got full access, and that's a tragedy as it was glorious.
It seems like some of it was, but for full albums of artists they just redirected it to the official artist uploads on YouTube. But, then if those links change it breaks old playlists and I lose track of it.
It was just such a convoluted mess. They promised you could upload all your music and it would be there forever, they said! Bastards...
I stopped scrobbling many years ago when they messed together my top artist at the time (the lovely "alan", spelled with all small letters) with other entirely unrelated artists by the same name (but with different letter case, e.g. some "Alan" this, and some "Alan" that.) It didn't represent at all what I was actually listening to, so what was the point?
Used their API to pull tag data as part of a project not too long ago and had to spend a disappointing amount of time filtering out literal hate tags/slurs and widespread deliberate mistagging.
It caused me to not make the code public until I can ship it with an allowlist. It's almost done but I got distracted
ooo... i thought Last.fm was a rebranding of audioscrobbler; i didn't know it was a parallel project. and I am an audioscrobbler user since 2006! and I've used it to this day, i mean, last.fm.
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.
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