Bear with me for a moment, as I take on the role of the ‘obnoxious’ music listener. Music is extremely important to me. It’s a deeply emotional ‘thing’. I take my listening habits and trends in my music taste very seriously and feel the need to keep track of. I analyze how my music taste has changed throughout various parts of my life. 

Don’t get me wrong, I have a plethora of playlists for various moods, and I have been making monthly playlists for over three years, but being created by myself, might not accurately depict the trends in my music habits. So, here comes what I believe to be an essential tool for music lovers; Last.fm. 

Last.fm is a platform and application that allows for people to keep track of and log their recent music listens, referred to as ‘scrobbles’, and compiles this information into a list of their top songs, albums, and artists over 4 different time periods: 7 days, 30 days, 365 days, and ‘all time’. Most people in my daily life have never used, or even heard of last.fm, which of course is up to them to use as they see fit but it upsets me.  I love seeing how my personal taste has grown and evolved. I am a very forgetful person, and usually am unable to remember what my musical interests were at any given point in the past. 

Last.fm’s tagline is “Music counts. Track, find and rediscover music”. The ‘track’, to me the most important part of last.fm, comes from its usage of scrobbles, in which a user’s music streaming service is linked to last.fm, allowing them to record every time a song, album, or artist downloaded to their music library is played. The ‘find’ comes from last.fm’s website, rather than the mobile application, providing the ability to recommend new music to the user based on their listening history. And lastly, ‘rediscover’, comes from the platform's ability to show the user’s entire listening history to “relive specific days, view your all-time stats and rediscover forgotten favorites”. Last.fm supports scrobbles imported from Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Soundcloud, YouTube Music, Deezer, Sonos, Bandcamp, Pandora, and more. 

As a sociology major, I am not a huge fan of submitting myself to the mass surveillance practices of the online world. However, seeing as this phenomena is pretty much inescapable as is, I might as well enjoy myself and submit my personal data. I find last.fm to be especially useful since, as an Apple Music user , the platform generated personal/top songs playlists are often not entirely accurate, so last.fm’s data driven tracking of scrobbles works wonders for me. Last.Fm is based on tracking ‘scrobbles’, and depending on the music platform, the user will have to listen to anywhere between half of the song to the entire thing for it to be scrobbled and added to their listening history. 

I log in to the application every few days, sometimes every day, and scan for scrobbles.  

I like to think of my use of Last.fm as a game, capitalizing on my urge to beat my own ‘scores’, maxing out the number of songs I listen to per day, and beating my record of new artists/songs discovered. I get to ~win~ at music and expand my music taste all in one go! Also, rather than having to wait till the end of the year to see your music metrics, through a Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay, Last.fm lets you access that information year round! I think last.fm is such an incredible platform, and I haven’t been able to find anything else like it.

Overall, I think more people should be using last.fm! 

Illustration: Jena Williams