Why you should use Last.fm
If you are fond of data and statistics about your musical tastes, consider signing into another social network.
I recently came across my old, almost forgotten, Last.fm account. After many months of digital-dust piling, I amazingly discovered a completely new user interface, new personal statistics based on my listenings and a useful integration with the music platform that is on everyone’s lips: Spotify.
What is Last.fm?
I am pretty sure that many people and music lovers already know it. Founded in 2002 in the United Kingdom, it was firstly a music website, then a streaming radio service and, soon, became a social network focused on music. Like all social networks, you can follow and be followed by friends, relatives, colleagues, or whoever has an interest in following you. Typically this happens between friends or strangers who have some musical tastes in common.
The magic word in Last.fm world, “scrobbling”
“Did you activate the scrobbling?” seems an intimidating technical question, it’s not actually. Let’s say that you have connected your Spotify account to Last.fm to track in real-time your music into Last.fm.
The process of automatically sending what you are listening to a third-party service is called “scrobbling”.
You can “scrobble” from an audio player installed on your PC or from platforms like Spotify, or Deezer.
When I joined Last.fm in 2011, I had a Dell Laptop running Ubuntu Linux and I had to install an external plug-in on my audio player to be able to scrobble. Old times, now with Spotify it takes literally two clicks.
What’s the best thing about Last.fm?
So here we come to the topic of this post. Is Last.fm good at suggesting new artists based on your preferences? Yes, definitely, but Spotify provides good recommendations too. Is it good at keeping you updated regarding events and concerts of your favorite artists in your area? Again, yes, but there are plenty of sources that you can use for that.
Last.fm shines at keeping track of all your listening history. Moreover, it provides advanced statistics about it.
This is the most interesting feature and, probably, the main reason why you would want to have an account, possibly a Pro account.
I must say that I was wise enough to set-up the scrobbling when I joined Spotify some years ago. When I logged into Last.fm recently, Spotify did not miss sending (or more specifically, scrobbling) every single track since then.
In Reports section, there is an amazing selection of charts and curiosities about what I listened to in the last years: week-on-week analysis, percentiles on the number of artists against the whole community, an awesome music genre timeline, new artists discovered month by month, and much more. Probably the most embarrassing chart is the “Mainstream-o-meter”, calculated by comparing your top artists for the week, with the week’s most popular artist. Yes, I had weeks in which my tastes were questionable at best.
I’m a fan of keeping track of what I do, whether it is a picture of me on the top of a mountain or a Facebook check-in in a restaurant I enjoyed. The same applies to what I listen to.
Checking what was queued in my playlists in a specific week in the past may help bring memories to mind.
In fact, there is scientific evidence that memories and emotions are evoked when we hear musical pieces from one’s past.
The Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote that:
“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it”.
Keeping the history of what we hear might be helpful.
