2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
23 comments
·December 14, 2025quirino
kaizenb
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
ostwilkens
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).
esafak
Part of the quantified self movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_self
The thing with data is that you have to act on it for it not to be a waste. This data is useful only to recommendation engineers. Spotify's end-of-year summary is more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.
twistslider
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.)
joecool1029
> Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling.
That's not true. It's missing from Apple Music but present in Tidal, Deezer, and Quobuz. It also works well with Plex.
A large list from them: https://support.last.fm/t/more-ways-to-scrobble/192
dev_l1x_be
Also from this era and loosely related.
glitchcrab
Good lord, Oink was only around for 4 years? I was one of the earlier signups and it felt more like 10 years.
wantlotsofcurry
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.
Nannooskeeska
tapmusic.org is currently parked by GoDaddy. Looks like you meant tapmusic.net
trocado
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.
cobertos
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
garrettgarcia
I'm still scrobbling after all these years.
photios
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.
majke
Richard Jones is still alive and kicking https://x.com/metabrew
slater
^ protected tweets. But he's also on Bsky:
kaizenb
Still a member of Last.fm, scrobbling since 4 Jan 2007 with 283,262 scrobbles.
doublerabbit
Checking mine, scrobbling since 9 Oct 2006 with 297,127 scrobbles myself.
ndespres
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.
kaizenb
nice!
timthorn
Memories. I wrote the initial Windows Media Player plugin for Audioscrobbler but didn't maintain it.
I'm a big fan of last.fm.
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.