As mentioned in the HN submission, Last.fm went through a redesign already over a decade ago. It stripped so much functionality that the site became useless except for merely tracking one's own listens, and there were already libre alternatives for that.
Last.fm is one of my go-to examples of how the internet has become a lonelier place. The old Last.fm was deeply linked with real life: it would show upcoming gigs in your town along with members who might be attending, and you could easily meet people in your own location who shared your own tastes in music. Where does a person find music-related socializing now?
> You could easily meet people in your own location who shared your own tastes in music. Where does a person find music-related socializing now
I'd say Instagram serves the role of Last.fm you described (for better or worse). But really you can just go to the gigs and talk to people. That's guaranteed people in your area with similar interests.
This is true, and I hate it. All the local DJs I enjoy post their gigs on instagram and nowhere else. All the fans I know use instagram to get updates about where the shows are happening.
In practice I just wait for my friends to tell me where the music will be, but I also hate the whole setup deeply and want instagram to die in a fire.
No seriously, like 18 months ago I solved this exact issue in my corner of the world by simply creating a static website and putting them there on a calendar and now I'm like a microcelebrity of my own running a "brand" that every organiser knows of.
I want to do the same but I live in a big city (millions of people). How do you recommend approaching this? There is no board/calendar that would get the attention of thousands of people and without that it's useless in a big city.
Check out Austin Texas https://do512.com for inspiration of music/event trackers. Personally, I think a "Whitelabel"-able version of this, ready to be localized to a city/town, would be cool - especially if it generated custom calendar (iCal). I checked out potential alternatives, and really didn't seem much out there - especially that would be attractive/stylish to music fans.
Additionally, an "MVP" could be a single HTML page, which lists all the recurring events, grouped by week-dat on a week calendar. For example, if there's a venue which hosts a weekly jam session on Thursdays, you could add that once and it would always show up for the "What's happening Thursday?" area. Usually there are a bunch of recurring events in any town, so the calendar page quickly becomes a useful "what to do today/tomorrow" guide, with minimal effort.
> There is no board/calendar that would get the attention of thousands of people
What makes you think that? Google/chatbots need a crawlable source. Instagram content is not a crawlable source. Be that crawlable source and they'll send the traffic your way. I get thousands of monthly visitors from Google alone. The next step in the funnel is to make them sign up for a weekly newsletter.
I'd also suggest a giant "purchase ticket here" button on every event page and measuring how many people click on it, it's infinitely easier to approach the organisers when you can easily whip out that statistic on your phone.
We're a small city so not sure how effective it would be for you, but https://theimage04.com/ was pretty revolutionary among the music circles here. Most people I spoke to loved the old-school newspaper classifieds vibe, and that there's no Web 2.0 bs.
You could do something similar and then print out physical copies of it and hand over a few to local music venues, cafes, pubs etc to spread the word.
I started mine last summer but gave up a few months ago. I just couldn't stand looking at insta every day to surface updates, and when I wrote a scraper (read only - no likes, comments, or posts) to do the job for me my account got banned for bot activity.
I also hate meta but unfortunately it's where many scenes live. Path of least resistance for venues, artists, to share their shows. I would disagree with the other commenter who said to "be the change". I've seen dozens of event aggregating sites and what they all lack is actual people using it. We live in Meta's hell, but everybody's there (speaking as Gen Z).
This is avoidable if you have a specific niche though. A lot of groups online and in cities give me hope. What kind of music are we talking here?
For those sounds, I'd stick to resident advisor and following the DJ's you like. Also check out Rinse FM for artist discovery if you're open to the British sound (they invented d&b and dubstep). Massive.
Your comment made me wonder if there could have been a world where MySpace would have acquired Last.fm and dove deeper into the music angle. MySpace had a niche thing with music that Facebook in my eyes never achieved. I hated Facebook when it launched, MySpace in my eyes was superior, I could connect with some of my favorite artists, though I rarely directly messaged them, except one time...
Fun personal story about MySpace:
One of my favorite rappers at the time Temperamento (Puerto Rican rapper) was going to do a song with a rapper from Puerto Rico (MC Ceja - his eyebrows are distinct) I had songs from in my first Cassette tape I ever had. They had some weird falling out, because my favorite rapper lived in the states most of his life, and the rapper from Puerto Rico did not like that he wanted to do a Mixtape, which was very hot at the time here.
Anyway, he announces he's not going to like it, but he might drop a diss to the other rapper, I was excited, but bittersweet, but I gave him all my support, I mentioned his older disses, he had stopped dissing people for like a year or two to make regular music. I noted one of my favorite disses he ever did, named the rapper, and the song track.
The next day, the diss drops. "My fans want me to do to you what I did to x" and the track playing was from the same diss I mentioned.
Years later, I messaged him on Instagram, he still remembered my message.
Things you can't get out of Facebook or Last.fm that MySpace could.
No idea, but people in that scene get killed, there's a lot of connections between some reggaeton artists and local drug lords, including being funded by them and protected by them. By insulting every rapper you can lash out against, chances are high, you will anger some very dangerous people, think of like angering a cartel boss' favorite celebrity that he built up and funds.
Hector "El Father" was very much underneath the biggest king pin across all of Puerto Rico, who kept all the different barrios / caserios at peace since he was the big chief, but after the government arrested him and those closest to him, that all changed, its kind of like how in Mexico all the cartels had a "federation" they didn't mess with each other, but they eventually lost control of "peace" amongst each other, in Puerto Rico's case, after the feds took the top guys to prison, all the different barrios / caserios not only went their own way, but it was a bloodbath of people trying to be the next in charge, so its a little more dispersed.
Not every reggaeton artist is "affiliated" this way, but a number are and can be. It all went back to a moment back in the 90s / early 2000s where they arrested rappers who lived in these neighborhoods with other drug dealers, as a result some artists fled further towards these types of people since they felt like the government was associating them all the same and arresting them the same. At least this is their view.
Wild world.
Edit:
Some rappers here in the states have similar things where they pay to be protected by gangs, or they were in specific gangs, and that gives them access to protection across the country, or specific states / regions when they tour.
The Game most recently noted he's the reason Chris Browns is "in the Bloods" in his latest album, which surprised me to hear, but googling around, apparently Chris Brown claims to be a member, even though it probably just means he pays them for protection.
Connecting through music has been a part of every relationship throughout my life.
I actually connected with people through last.fm in real life. I remember the site telling me that I had a lot in common with someone so I sent a message since we lived in the same city. After lots of chatting through the site we eventually met and dated for a bit.
That's not a Last.fm issue, that's a general trend that affects everything.
People don't blog on their personal sites any more, blog comments don't really exist any more, MySpace / Tumblr like sites are not popular any more and people don't share everything private on social media any more as everyone realized that the internet is not always a friendly place and there's enough public cases where this fired back.
The same also applies to the platform itself, opening yourself up to more user contributed data is often a real headache as you need to moderate it properly and that needs resources too. Ask Meta's moderator team how much fun they are having.
I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music
rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)
Listing every issue of an album in every country and every format is precisely what Musicbrainz was founded for (as a successor to CDDB). Any social features are just extras on top of that.
If you're interested trainspotting individual CD serial numbers, then there's nothing quite like it. But my gut feeling is that there's a lot of folks with digital music collections who don't give a hoot about that stuff, and are interested in metadata about the song they just heard (the who, the when, the instruments / genres / moods, lyrics). For this audience, there are few decent, clean metadata sources. But when you ask, people will point you to MusicBrainz or tools that use it as a source (like Picard or Beets). You have to fight tooth and nail to avoid tagging a 70s album year as "2005" because there happened to be a remaster that year. Who. Fucking. Cares what year a Remaster happened when it's a 1976 album that you don't want showing up in your "Best of 2005" smart playlists.
As for social features, nobody is ever going to use MusicBrainz. They might have used RYM or Last.FM before the site owners made them unusable or pointless.
I will! Actually I started a personal project for music discovery and exploration. It's currently a dirt simple local app with about 50k tracks (YouTube embed, track credits, genre, rating).
I was going to add Spotify metadata from that recent data dump, but it's kinda trash data (valence isn't trustworthy, wildly wrong a lot of the time).
I then stumbled on lrclib data dump, local LLM and a super two step prompt that extracts extremely high quality lyric based metadata (about the narrator, protagonist, setting, story arc, moods etc)
Anyway, even though I bitched about MusicBrainz in another comment, their JSON dumps can be coaxed into giving the sort of metadata that I wanted to get from RYM, who absolutely suck due to their crazy aggressive blocking, self sabotage and unforgivable data poisoning if you trigger their bot tripwire. Their data came from their users, but as a paying user you can't use their site to tag your music. No API, and you get banned if you try to write a music player plugin to fix the tags in your "now playing" track. I don't know what their business plan is, or who they think their audience is.
I feel like the main thrust of his complaint was that he used it to connect socially. I agree that there are multiple viable ways to find new "related" music, however,
For those now following the Last.fm so closely, in May of this year they became independent again (https://support.last.fm/t/last-fm-is-now-independent/118591) after being owned by CBS for a very long time, which is very exciting and I'm glad it wasn't just shut down by CBS.
I'm not sure why we are nit-picking that but untyped doesn't mean legacy, and having fields that should be identical be called differently or missing across API routes happens to tiny startups, side projects and big corporates.
Lovely - not my typical reaction to a 500px wide, gray, monospaced site, but I suppose it is lovely that it isn't a 5MB creature like we expect nowadays.
> Page size around 85 KB
If they compressed their favico the site would be closer to 5KB!
As mentioned in the HN submission, Last.fm went through a redesign already over a decade ago. It stripped so much functionality that the site became useless except for merely tracking one's own listens, and there were already libre alternatives for that.
Last.fm is one of my go-to examples of how the internet has become a lonelier place. The old Last.fm was deeply linked with real life: it would show upcoming gigs in your town along with members who might be attending, and you could easily meet people in your own location who shared your own tastes in music. Where does a person find music-related socializing now?
> You could easily meet people in your own location who shared your own tastes in music. Where does a person find music-related socializing now
I'd say Instagram serves the role of Last.fm you described (for better or worse). But really you can just go to the gigs and talk to people. That's guaranteed people in your area with similar interests.
This is true, and I hate it. All the local DJs I enjoy post their gigs on instagram and nowhere else. All the fans I know use instagram to get updates about where the shows are happening.
In practice I just wait for my friends to tell me where the music will be, but I also hate the whole setup deeply and want instagram to die in a fire.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
No seriously, like 18 months ago I solved this exact issue in my corner of the world by simply creating a static website and putting them there on a calendar and now I'm like a microcelebrity of my own running a "brand" that every organiser knows of.
I want to do the same but I live in a big city (millions of people). How do you recommend approaching this? There is no board/calendar that would get the attention of thousands of people and without that it's useless in a big city.
Check out Austin Texas https://do512.com for inspiration of music/event trackers. Personally, I think a "Whitelabel"-able version of this, ready to be localized to a city/town, would be cool - especially if it generated custom calendar (iCal). I checked out potential alternatives, and really didn't seem much out there - especially that would be attractive/stylish to music fans.
Additionally, an "MVP" could be a single HTML page, which lists all the recurring events, grouped by week-dat on a week calendar. For example, if there's a venue which hosts a weekly jam session on Thursdays, you could add that once and it would always show up for the "What's happening Thursday?" area. Usually there are a bunch of recurring events in any town, so the calendar page quickly becomes a useful "what to do today/tomorrow" guide, with minimal effort.
> There is no board/calendar that would get the attention of thousands of people
What makes you think that? Google/chatbots need a crawlable source. Instagram content is not a crawlable source. Be that crawlable source and they'll send the traffic your way. I get thousands of monthly visitors from Google alone. The next step in the funnel is to make them sign up for a weekly newsletter.
I'd also suggest a giant "purchase ticket here" button on every event page and measuring how many people click on it, it's infinitely easier to approach the organisers when you can easily whip out that statistic on your phone.
We're a small city so not sure how effective it would be for you, but https://theimage04.com/ was pretty revolutionary among the music circles here. Most people I spoke to loved the old-school newspaper classifieds vibe, and that there's no Web 2.0 bs.
You could do something similar and then print out physical copies of it and hand over a few to local music venues, cafes, pubs etc to spread the word.
I started mine last summer but gave up a few months ago. I just couldn't stand looking at insta every day to surface updates, and when I wrote a scraper (read only - no likes, comments, or posts) to do the job for me my account got banned for bot activity.
Fuck instagram.
Are they not also on Resident Advisor?
I think it's possible for 3rd parties to add to Resident Advisor.
I also dislike Insta only events. I still have facebook where I follow up on some venues. But just a few websites with calanders would be coolio.
RA is great for big cities but mine is too small for them.
I also hate meta but unfortunately it's where many scenes live. Path of least resistance for venues, artists, to share their shows. I would disagree with the other commenter who said to "be the change". I've seen dozens of event aggregating sites and what they all lack is actual people using it. We live in Meta's hell, but everybody's there (speaking as Gen Z).
This is avoidable if you have a specific niche though. A lot of groups online and in cities give me hope. What kind of music are we talking here?
EDM primarily. House, drum and bass, and dubstep seem to be the most common around my area.
For those sounds, I'd stick to resident advisor and following the DJ's you like. Also check out Rinse FM for artist discovery if you're open to the British sound (they invented d&b and dubstep). Massive.
Your comment made me wonder if there could have been a world where MySpace would have acquired Last.fm and dove deeper into the music angle. MySpace had a niche thing with music that Facebook in my eyes never achieved. I hated Facebook when it launched, MySpace in my eyes was superior, I could connect with some of my favorite artists, though I rarely directly messaged them, except one time...
Fun personal story about MySpace:
One of my favorite rappers at the time Temperamento (Puerto Rican rapper) was going to do a song with a rapper from Puerto Rico (MC Ceja - his eyebrows are distinct) I had songs from in my first Cassette tape I ever had. They had some weird falling out, because my favorite rapper lived in the states most of his life, and the rapper from Puerto Rico did not like that he wanted to do a Mixtape, which was very hot at the time here.
Anyway, he announces he's not going to like it, but he might drop a diss to the other rapper, I was excited, but bittersweet, but I gave him all my support, I mentioned his older disses, he had stopped dissing people for like a year or two to make regular music. I noted one of my favorite disses he ever did, named the rapper, and the song track.
The next day, the diss drops. "My fans want me to do to you what I did to x" and the track playing was from the same diss I mentioned.
Years later, I messaged him on Instagram, he still remembered my message.
Things you can't get out of Facebook or Last.fm that MySpace could.
Wild world.
Yeesh. What a bunch of babies.
(All of this—and these people—are supposed to be cool?)
No idea, but people in that scene get killed, there's a lot of connections between some reggaeton artists and local drug lords, including being funded by them and protected by them. By insulting every rapper you can lash out against, chances are high, you will anger some very dangerous people, think of like angering a cartel boss' favorite celebrity that he built up and funds.
Hector "El Father" was very much underneath the biggest king pin across all of Puerto Rico, who kept all the different barrios / caserios at peace since he was the big chief, but after the government arrested him and those closest to him, that all changed, its kind of like how in Mexico all the cartels had a "federation" they didn't mess with each other, but they eventually lost control of "peace" amongst each other, in Puerto Rico's case, after the feds took the top guys to prison, all the different barrios / caserios not only went their own way, but it was a bloodbath of people trying to be the next in charge, so its a little more dispersed.
Not every reggaeton artist is "affiliated" this way, but a number are and can be. It all went back to a moment back in the 90s / early 2000s where they arrested rappers who lived in these neighborhoods with other drug dealers, as a result some artists fled further towards these types of people since they felt like the government was associating them all the same and arresting them the same. At least this is their view.
Wild world.
Edit:
Some rappers here in the states have similar things where they pay to be protected by gangs, or they were in specific gangs, and that gives them access to protection across the country, or specific states / regions when they tour.
The Game most recently noted he's the reason Chris Browns is "in the Bloods" in his latest album, which surprised me to hear, but googling around, apparently Chris Brown claims to be a member, even though it probably just means he pays them for protection.
This.
My best friend cold-messaged me on last.fm 18 years ago: "wanna exchange music? add me on MSN: ..."
Connecting through music has been a part of every relationship throughout my life.
I actually connected with people through last.fm in real life. I remember the site telling me that I had a lot in common with someone so I sent a message since we lived in the same city. After lots of chatting through the site we eventually met and dated for a bit.
A bigger question is why Last.fm did this, and why they don't do it again now that they're independent. I've been on Last.fm. since 2005 at least.
That's not a Last.fm issue, that's a general trend that affects everything.
People don't blog on their personal sites any more, blog comments don't really exist any more, MySpace / Tumblr like sites are not popular any more and people don't share everything private on social media any more as everyone realized that the internet is not always a friendly place and there's enough public cases where this fired back.
The same also applies to the platform itself, opening yourself up to more user contributed data is often a real headache as you need to moderate it properly and that needs resources too. Ask Meta's moderator team how much fun they are having.
I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music
rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)
Listing every issue of an album in every country and every format is precisely what Musicbrainz was founded for (as a successor to CDDB). Any social features are just extras on top of that.
If you're interested trainspotting individual CD serial numbers, then there's nothing quite like it. But my gut feeling is that there's a lot of folks with digital music collections who don't give a hoot about that stuff, and are interested in metadata about the song they just heard (the who, the when, the instruments / genres / moods, lyrics). For this audience, there are few decent, clean metadata sources. But when you ask, people will point you to MusicBrainz or tools that use it as a source (like Picard or Beets). You have to fight tooth and nail to avoid tagging a 70s album year as "2005" because there happened to be a remaster that year. Who. Fucking. Cares what year a Remaster happened when it's a 1976 album that you don't want showing up in your "Best of 2005" smart playlists.
As for social features, nobody is ever going to use MusicBrainz. They might have used RYM or Last.FM before the site owners made them unusable or pointless.
I made Raygum to (hopefully) simplify what you're describing - https://raygum.com
Please email me (<username>@gmail.com) with any feedback or to rant about music apps in general!
I will! Actually I started a personal project for music discovery and exploration. It's currently a dirt simple local app with about 50k tracks (YouTube embed, track credits, genre, rating).
I was going to add Spotify metadata from that recent data dump, but it's kinda trash data (valence isn't trustworthy, wildly wrong a lot of the time).
I then stumbled on lrclib data dump, local LLM and a super two step prompt that extracts extremely high quality lyric based metadata (about the narrator, protagonist, setting, story arc, moods etc)
Anyway, even though I bitched about MusicBrainz in another comment, their JSON dumps can be coaxed into giving the sort of metadata that I wanted to get from RYM, who absolutely suck due to their crazy aggressive blocking, self sabotage and unforgivable data poisoning if you trigger their bot tripwire. Their data came from their users, but as a paying user you can't use their site to tag your music. No API, and you get banned if you try to write a music player plugin to fix the tags in your "now playing" track. I don't know what their business plan is, or who they think their audience is.
Is it not possible to discover new artist you might like based on your taste?
I don't see how this relates to anything the parent comment talked about.
He said it become useless except for tracking. For me it was a place for music discovery.
I feel like the main thrust of his complaint was that he used it to connect socially. I agree that there are multiple viable ways to find new "related" music, however,
Resident Advisor. Spotify also tells me when a band's in town.
For those now following the Last.fm so closely, in May of this year they became independent again (https://support.last.fm/t/last-fm-is-now-independent/118591) after being owned by CBS for a very long time, which is very exciting and I'm glad it wasn't just shut down by CBS.
Self-hosted Koito[0] and glad I left Last.fm.
Not even a good first-party export, gotta use some hacked together third-party one to get your data out.
[0]: https://github.com/gabehf/koito
ListenBrainz[0] is a decent alternative if you don't want to self-host. You can import your Last.fm scrobbles there pretty easily.
[0]: https://listenbrainz.org/
A lot of people run both koito and listenbrainz
As someone doing exactly this, shoutout to FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler[0] for keeping all my music databases in sync.
[0]: https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler
[dead]
> "...Tell me your username and i'll give you (six) URLs..."
> (period can be: 7day, 1month, 3month, 6month, 12month or overall)
> Recent tracks
> Loved tracks
> Top tracks
> Top Artists
> Recommended tracks
> Recommended tracks in JSON format
https://github.com/xiffy/lfm
I've been using xiffy last.fm feeds for awhile and am satisfied with the combo.
> But I also wept. How is it possible that two almost identical endpoints have the key names differ on several spots or complete absent.
average legacy PHP backend :)
The PHP part is unnecessary there, any code base that's more than a hobbyist project will have these kind of issues.
It's mostly a legacy untyped backend thing.
I'm not sure why we are nit-picking that but untyped doesn't mean legacy, and having fields that should be identical be called differently or missing across API routes happens to tiny startups, side projects and big corporates.
I'm not the one nit picking
Last.fm is an old php app
It's a joke
Go touch grass
That not php fault. Maybe old ass versions of php or shot implementations. But strong typing is possible in modern php
Besides the useful product, also a very lovely site.
Page size around 85 KB, bullshit around 0 BS, loaded in 140 ms on my end.
Lovely - not my typical reaction to a 500px wide, gray, monospaced site, but I suppose it is lovely that it isn't a 5MB creature like we expect nowadays.
> Page size around 85 KB
If they compressed their favico the site would be closer to 5KB!
Is the code public? I'd like to port this to https://rss-bridge.org/
Cool!
I'm wondering why my recommended tracks are different between the two feed formats? Same uid as here.
Also, my JSON feed doesn't seem to validate and is not served with the proper MIME type.
Yes! Been wanting something like this for my personal dashboard. So much easier than hitting their full API just for scrobbles.
Don't see any slop in the code. Good job!