CBS Coporation (owned by Paramount) bought last.fm in 2007
Huge opportunity to allow folk to own their own (meta)data. /fingerscrossed
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
I wonder how they're going to position themselves now.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Just declaring themselves independent without details doesn't provide much context. I feel like Michael Scott just declared bankruptcy.
"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.
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'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.
- 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/.
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.
last.fm is one of those services that is from the pinnacle of the open web.
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...
[0]: https://listenbrainz.org/
[1]: https://github.com/metabrainz/listenbrainz-server
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nubinetwork•1h ago