Last.fm

I am a weirdo who likes meticulous lists of my music habits broken up into several different variables... and the recommendations.

So, lemme get this straight, from what I've been reading about this:

1. You no longer have "friends" on the site, more "people you are following" and "people who are following you" - why this needed to be changed, I don't know.

2. There is no way of seeing who your "neighbours" are, or the accounts of the people your music taste closely matches... therefore, how are you meant to find people to "follow"? Random browsing?

3. There is no "compatibility bar", therefore no way of quickly seeing how closely a persons music taste matches yours without browsing deep into their library, in which case you have to use the numerous drop-down menus to actually see for yourself, whereas before you could conveniently see most of this information on a persons front page.

4. No display of a persons age, gender or location on their actual profile, they've limited the "About Me" section to a smaller amount of characters and there's a lack of customisation to a persons profile. There's also (at present) no "groups". You still have your shoutbox and private messages, but basically it seems that they've hollowed out most of the "social" element, rendering it almost useless on that front.

5. The "recommendations" function has been pared back considerably, where once you were able to go quite deep into the recommendations portion of the site, now it only displays 10 results at any given time. Apparently, you can't "dismiss" anything or "add" anything to your library at the moment. You have the ability to view recommendations by Artists, Albums or Track, but from what I've read, people are getting track recommendations for tracks they've already listened to and album recommendations for Greatest Hits/Best Of's or artists which already have hundreds of listens on their profile. What's the point? It basically seems like they've taken a perfectly great feature and again, rendered it almost useless.

6. From the sounds of it, the seem to have focused more on the re-design of the site rather than solving a more frustrating problem, which is getting people's tracks to fucking scrobble properly without having "lost" scrobbles etc.

On the other hand, here's what you can do...

1. Better, deeper way of actually browsing through what you've listened to over the years, which I suppose is great, but at the cost of all the features they've stripped out of the site?

2. On the main page you can see what artists and songs are "trending", which is great if you choose to listen to or seek out music that way but many, many people don't - for those that didn't care about how many people were listening to Lana Del Rey, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay or The Beatles on a daily basis, they tended to use the site by seeking out like-minded people with similar tastes or using the recommendations function. Oh, wait...

So basically, if you want to keep up with what's popular and you don't mind being a "statistic", then last.fm seems to be a good option. For finding people with similar tastes to chew the fat with or to find deep recommendations on that site, I think the game is up... as for scrobbling/stats, well, they're pretty useless just on their own. Personally, I don't need to see an on-screen layout of everything that I've listened to the most to know what my favourite albums or artists are. Remove the social/recommendations aspect to it and there is legitimately no fucking point of scrobbling - might as well use a search engine, or your "play count" function on your media player, and stop worrying about whether the scrobbler is working properly or not.

I guess audioscrobbler/last.fm was a pretty novel thing or a good experiment at first, but I think its definitely ran its course and is worthless in its current form.

another good feature apparently taken away: "friends who listen to this artist"

unregistered otm re: shoutboxes

i do like the new "top albums" thing

Just noticed a lot (if not all) of my duplicate track scrobbles were cleared.

Duplicates appear to have cleared for me too.

Last.fm is now largely useless for my purposes: apprising me of recent releases artists in my library, digging deep into related artists (and usually having to exclude other locals).

Has anyone found where recent releases has moved to?

scrobbling works again, dgaf about anything else

they've limited the "About Me" section to a smaller amount of characters

They've also deleted everyone's existing "About Me" text, whether it fitted the number of characters or not (pretty sure mine would've as it was a single goofy quote rather than an actual profile).

Someone I know is pissed off because apparently he actually used it to see which bands were playing in his town, add all the gigs he was going to, and use the resulting gig calendar to remind him where to be when. Now you can't see any of that stuff.

(I didn't use that stuff myself because every gig it ever told me about was in London, where I am not.)

Someone I know is pissed off because apparently he actually used it to see which bands were playing in his town, add all the gigs he was going to, and use the resulting gig calendar to remind him where to be when. Now you can't see any of that stuff.

That is exactly what I use it for :(

The big question I have over this re-design is what do the last.fm developers think last.fm is for? Do they really think that people give that much of a shit about how many people are listening to The Beatles worldwide? Who cares!?

You can betmost of the devs arent 10+ year users of it and just want to show off what they can do and dgaf about what the users liked about it

Yeah. I still think there's potential for a great music-related social media site, though... even though the ones I've come across over the years haven't really hit the mark, and last.fm seems to be going down the plughole.

Wondered where the gig calendar had gone, I maybe don't sue it as much as I used to but still found it useful.

It probably got bored of getting sued :P

ha ha!

The calendar was the only part of the site I really liked. I used to add events to it all the time.

I mean I think the general calendar is still there but not my own list of upcoming events I'm attending.

I hope Last.fm survives - it is the only non-cynical, non-depressing and global and inspiring music site out there. As an American from Chicago, it's amazing to see music made in your backyard find its way all over the world. I love it as a means of international communication and expression.

The site has always looked nice, too.

Internet seems hell bent on pissing on anyone's hopes for world peace.

one cool thing that's probably just a side effect of other changes: shoutboxes for albums

album shoutboxes have been around for as long as I've been on last.fm. ex. http://www.last.fm/music/Miles+Davis/Filles+De+Kilimanjaro (w/ shouts dating back to 2008). the main difference with beta is that shoutboxes (for users, songs, artists, and albums) are now limited to the 10 most recent shouts, and all shouts beyond that limit have been deleted.

damn, i ought to have known that

yeah the ten shout limit thing is terrible.

i want to believe that the new site is just presenting a new framework that's more amenable to incremental feature addition (i.e. more stats)... i should care less about this, though

i should care less about this, though

yeah even though i know that in the scheme of things this whole enterprise is silly and just not worth caring about, the changes still leave me extremely frustrated

looks like there's no way to change your location for events?

I just tried to 'love' a track while it was playing and it disappeared from Recent Tracks altogether ha.

Anyone followed another user yet?

Nope.

Yes, I'm still mad at how abysmally bad the redesign turned out to be.

I'm very surprised that nobody has taken the opportunity to set up an alternative yet.

Am I just being dim or is there no way to just see a feed of what the people I follow are listening to?

People are still using this?

Yes, but since I feel annoyed every time I visit the site and have to struggle to find anything I want, might be leaving soon.

you can never leave the internet...

is there something else out there which is good for just scrobbling plays?

literally the only reason i still have a last.fm, albeit rarely checked, but the scrobbler barely works any more anyway and that's the only thing i want tracked

I'm keeping an eye on this: http://listenbrainz.org

It's not ready yet, but could be an alternative in the future.

There is Libre.fm as well but doesn't seem to be under development and doesn't support events etc.

Good god. last.fm's "similar artists" feature was pretty much the deepest and most useful/accurate of its kind on the net. But with the new redesign, only 10 similar artists are displayed. Bah!

― brimstead, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 5:44 PM (2 months ago)

I also noticed that shoutboxes now only include the 10 most recent shouts (whereas you used to be able to browse through hundreds of shouts dating back nearly a decade)

― scarlett bohansson (unregistered), Sunday, August 23, 2015 5:26 PM (2 months ago)

both of these features have been restored/corrected, fyi

yeah there are still things i'm not happy are gone (that you could see which or yr friends/ppl you follow/whatever listen to an artist and how much on the artist page was convenient) but for now i'm waiting and hoping they'll eventually be restored.

Or just revert to the obviously superior old version.

^

...and now album cover art for the "recent tracks" list is back.

i too hope they restore the social stuff... seems like a really strange thing to scale back on in 2015

http://i1093.photobucket.com/albums/i431/SwampMan91/icon_eq.gif

Heads up, you can now change your top artists/albums back to the old "list" format by clicking on your profile page's settings gears.

Cool. Fair play to them - the lists are actually better than the old ones now.

List of the most-scrobbled artists on LastFM, courtesy of Reddit user NubsFtw: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EC7c0wUD3IzqRT-zd1Rv2ebS6hUPolsZ4AMr_hRilWI/edit#gid=0&vpid=A2

Black artists in the Top 50:
Kanye West (#20)
Rihanna (#30)

Beyonce is just below the cut, tied with the Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish.

I knew the userbase was rock-centric (top 2 artists tagged as funk: RHCP & Jamiroquai) but remind me again why we bother patting ourselves on the back over the crossover breakouts of late Armstrong/Berry/Charles et al? Is taste less segregated now than the days of Louis Jordan and Jimmie Lunceford?

sounds like rym is fairly keen on adding last.fm style functionality, ways away from their funding goal though

https://sonemic.com/campaign/3/

I guess I'm just a simple guy but Knut here really tickled me when I logged on earlier

http://i.imgur.com/gHtNlwc.png

"You've got an ad blocker installed!"
Yes, I sure do.
"You've got an ad blocker installed!"
"You've got an ad blocker installed!"
"You've got an ad blocker installed!"
"You've got an ad blocker installed!"
"You've got an ad blocker installed!"
Uggghhh fuck off last.fm I'm just trying to statscock

oh so they made it even more unusable? glad I left

It's a perfect combination of passive-aggressive popup and repeatedly fooling you into thinking that maybe you can use the site, then nope!4

Really not sure why I bother using it anymore, maybe I'll stop