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Why I Still Use Last.FM (And You Should Too)
So…Spotify, huh?
The end of 2024 wasn’t the best time for Spotify, and the end-of-year Spotify Wrapped release opened the floodgates; The New Yorker decried the “hollow allure” of Spotify’s algorithms pretending to celebrate your music tastes. Business Insider was even more damning, citing user complaints that Wrapped was “boring” and a “flop” (Business Insider).
Yet, despite all this, “You Can’t Outrun Spotify,” says The Verge. Notwithstanding the universally hostile reception to 2024’s Wrapped, the Swedish company continues to appoint itself as the gatekeeper of all things music in the streaming era, not limited to — but certainly including — how we remember and celebrate our own music listening.
In the closing days of 2024, music journalist Laura Snapes noted that while she “begrudgingly” uses Spotify, she found an alternative to the “gaudy” Spotify Wrapped and that alternative isn’t a new app dreamed up by a disgruntled music lover. No, the end-of-year review Snapes enjoyed came from the 20-year-old little music website that could: Last.fm.
It’s tempting to think of Last.fm as just an alternative to Spotify Wrapped, but as Snapes wrote in her Guardian article, Last.fm tells a more complete and rounded musical story of her life than Spotify Wrapped ever could. While Spotify may have an ironclad grip on how the world listens to music (and presents that in Spotify Wrapped), Last.fm counts music from everywhere — your local digital music library, the CDs at the public library, YouTube videos and vinyl players, your audio cassette collection, and, yes, Spotify — and creates a nuanced, evolving collage of all the music you listen to.
And you don’t have to wait until November to see what that collage looks like.
Last.fm found life as a Germany- and Austria-based Internet radio station and community website in 2002, allowing users to create a history of what they listened to, share and compare profiles with other users, and recommend playlists based on those profiles. Concurrently, a computer scientist in England created the Audioscrobbler plugin, where the verb “scrobble” referred to (consensually) tracking the music that people listened to across different operating systems to create a similar kind of profile to what the Last.fm team had in mind.
In 2003, Audioscrobbler and Last.fm started working together, and by 2005, they had completely merged; music listening could be tracked through the combined Last.fm radio and the Audioscrobbler plugin, allowing more users to create their own music listening histories.
Eventually, Audioscrobbler was folded into Last.fm, which became serious business in the mid-2000s; Channel 4 Radio in England based one of their weekly chart shows on what Last.fm users were scrobbling, and in 2008, the site debuted Portishead’s Third album a week before its commercial release.
So hot was Last.fm that in 2008, it was acquired by CBS Interactive (now part of Paramount Global) for the equivalent of $396.5 million in 2023 dollars, bringing Last.fm’s charts to American radio markets.
But just when it seemed like the sky was the limit for Last.fm, the landscape was changing. Licensing issues meant that users in some countries lost access to Last.fm radio, and users in other countries had to subscribe to keep listening (a given today, but unthinkable in the early days of music streaming).
Last.fm wasn’t helped by some unenforced errors of its own; its fans negatively received various changes to the website and the plug-ins; several social features were dropped; and as Spotify became dominant, smaller players suffered. By 2014, Last.fm radio was gone, replaced by…Spotify integration.
Last.fm today is a far cry from its meteoric rise from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s; it has no radio of its own, and its social functions are all but gone. In something of an obiturary, Vice wrote (in 2017) that Last.fm “was the only music social network that made sense.”
And yet, it keeps ticking; per the site’s own metrics, its users have scrobbled over 226 billion songs since 2003 and counting.
So, why do I still use — and love — Last.fm? While Spotify Wrapped may offer a one-and-done look at my yearly Spotify listening, Last.fm is my personal music museum. It lets me see how my music listening has grown and changed over the years (to be precise: over two decades, 20 years of my music history, meticulously and automatically cataloged for me to fawn over).
As I’ve grown older and my tastes have changed, I can see artists and genres I’ve picked up, that I’ve left behind, and the favorites that have remained.
And it’s so easy. Last.fm barely takes up any space: you download the app or the plug-in, give it the relevant permissions…and that’s it. You literally don’t have to interact with it beyond that. The paid version will let you edit tags (no more “remastered” or “deluxe edition” titles everywhere), and give you extra reports; but you can also scrobble for the rest of your life, and not spend a penny on Last.fm. The app (either the official one or some very good fan-made apps) can give you information about what you’re listening to or more insight into your library, but the scrobbling process can be completely invisible if you want it to be.
Or, Last.fm can take up all the space you want it to; you can check your charts every day, once a month, once a year, or never; however much or little you look, Last.fm will keep cataloging every song you listen to, creating an ongoing, evolving picture of your music history.
If you like stats, graphs, charts, and data, and if you love music, then Last.fm is the thing for you. I didn’t know an Eddington number was a thing until I found mine on lastfmstats.com, one of the best third-party websites in the Last.fm ecosystem.
You want to know the time of day you listen to music the most? What day of the week you listen to music the most? The month of the year? And you want to know what songs you listen to during those times? Want to know how many songs you listened to last year? Want to know how many times you listened to a particular album? Want to know your most-listened-to song on that particular album or any album? Want to know what you listened to on a particular date last year? Two years ago? Twenty years ago? Or do you not care about any of that at all, and you just want to know how many times you’ve listened to your favorite artist?
It won’t make you popular at parties, but Last.fm can be as overarching or granular as you want.
Think of Last.fm less like a better Spotify Wrapped, and more like Google Photos, or some other online photo album. You can take all the pictures you want, but having a website that puts all your photos into a timeline that stretches back years gives those pictures a place and context.
It’s the same with Last.fm. I’ve had my account since 2005 (with a long period of inactivity from 2009 to 2022), and the the more I scrobble and keep adding to my Last.fm library, the more complete and complex my music library and my music listening become. And as someone who listens to a lot of music and thinks a lot about the music he listens to, that’s kind of important.
Will you like Last.fm? If you think of music as the soundtrack to your life — where you remember chapters and seasons of your life in terms of the music you listen to — then Last.fm can be your compendium and your companion.
And that’s where the beauty of Last.fm lies: its longevity. As much as the site can reward daily check-ins, you’re likely to get the most value from visiting your profile after your charts have had time to mature and grow.
As such, it’s not surprising to see people on social media celebrating Last.fm anniversaries; one Reddit user writes about how, in celebrating their 33rd birthday, they’ve had their Last.fm account for over half their life. Imagine that: a personalized record of everything you listened to for 17 consecutive years, like a gallery of your life through your music. Another user remarked that they started using Last.fm in their college dorm, and now their library is full of Disney songs they play for their child.
Spotify makes Wrapped all about itself, but your Last.fm profile is about you.
Maybe I’m preaching to the choir here — a lot of audiophiles will already have left Spotify behind for any number of reasons — but Amil Niazi in The Globe and Mail bemoans the fact that, for tens of millions of fellow music lovers, Spotify Wrapped has become regrettably synonymous with celebrating music tastes.
Meanwhile, far out of the spotlight, a little website founded over 20 years ago keeps counting scrobbles, showing people the ongoing story of their lives through the music they’re listening to.
