I don’t know if they ever officially said how that worked, but I’m fairly sure it relied on play counts. It wasn’t black magic, but it was still technically impressive. As far as I know, as of today no Mac/iOS music players do this. Technically music players can start letting you authenticate with Listenbrainz in addition to or instead of Last.fm and send your listens there too. The other reason this is bad is that it might stop working. Lord knows the APIs they do have barely work. Why? Probably because Last.fm doesn’t want them doing this, and probably has no API for it. Why? Because it seems to basically load and scrape each page of listens from your Last.fm profile. You have to remember to come back and do it regularly. Listenbrainz will let you import all your listens from Last.fm, and will let you download it in a fairly structured payload. You know that right? Don’t you want a backup plan? Don’t you want a way to get your money outta that bank before it craters? That’s Listenbrainz. Here is how I think of Listenbrainz: Yes we all can hardly believe that Last.fm still stands, but the clock is ticking. 4 Its goal is to be a “public permanent” store of your listen history, to make this data available for download, and share this in some technically knowable and supported fashion. Listenbrainz is part of the MetaBrainz Foundation. So how did I make the plot at the top of this post? I mentioned in passing that Last.fm used to let you export your data including all scrobbles and loved tracks, and that this disappeared at some point. It’s the internet, and nothing is forever, even if some things feel like they are. Every time I update that plot I wonder how many more years of data I’ll be able to add to it. 3 Their Twitter account is fairly active. The listening reports feature gets improvements every once in a while. 2Īnd in a world that has turned its back on, then mooned the interconnectivity of Web 2.0, in a world where APIs get turned off and rarely on, Last.fm still commands death-defying loyalty with music listeners who demand scrobbling of old and new music apps and streaming services. Throughout all of this, the ups, downs, happy days and sad, not being owned by a large media conglomerate and being owned by a large media conglomerate, the site never stopped accepting scrobbles. which was a proper service status page now redirects to a Twitter account. They used to let you export your data, that went away. No everything was great! Then came a redesign or two, the streaming died and got replaced with a hacky “we’ll just play YouTube videos and pretend you’re streaming” setup, Groups which was actually fun died, CBS bought the company (that was the moment I thought it was all over), and then a long silence during which it felt like every other month a piece of the site would disappear. 1 As far as I know, that’s the only useful thing any third party app did with what happened on your iPod.Įverything was fine. They figured out how to create a plugin that automatically scrobbled what you listened to in iTunes, but that also figured out how to scrobble what you listened to on your iPod. In its heyday it had a technical blog and a staff that posted photos of server rooms and office space, it had actual streaming radio that did intelligent things with music it knew you liked, they put random slogans at the bottom of site pages. I don’t know what Myspace is today, it looks like it’s a social network for singers and actors? No one who uses it today sits and thinks about where it was and how it got to where it is now. Do you feel anything when I say “Google”? No you don’t.Īlso thing is, Myspace doesn’t exist the way Last.fm still exists. That’s right: Last.fm is older than Myspace! And Google is…well who gives a shit about Google. First of all Myspace launched in 2003, so it’s technically 19 years old. Google is like, 100 years old or something. Now you could say so what, right? Myspace is still alive and its website still technically loads. Last.fm is an anomaly, a mutation of the internet, and a service that just celebrated its 20th birthday. Last.fm remembers every day of the last fourteen years of my life.
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