Comment by twistslider

Comment by twistslider 2 days ago

Last.fm is still used quite a bit, mainly as a listening history tracker rather than a radio or recommendation engine.

Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling. For everything else it's a lot more DIY, usually with third party tools at the device level.

A big reason it’s still relevant is the ecosystem around it. The API hasn't really changed in 15 years, which makes it easy to build tools where a username alone is enough. That kind of lightweight social integration has mostly disappeared elsewhere.

Today, the social / community side is almost entirely just Discord. Nearly every music related server has a bot that displays Last.fm stats. My estimate is that abut 10% of Last.fm their users are also active in Discord music communities.

(Disclaimer: I run .fmbot, a Discord bot that integrates with Last.fm.)

joecool1029 2 days ago

> Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling.

That's not true. It's missing from Apple Music but present in Tidal, Deezer, and Quobuz. It also works well with Plex.

A large list from them: https://support.last.fm/t/more-ways-to-scrobble/192

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twistslider 2 days ago

These integrations are lacking compared to Spotify. For example in Tidal you have to set it for each device where you install the app, and it doesn't work with things like casting. It's easy to forget to set it up which can cause gaps in your history.
The Plex integration gets pretty close to native, but it only scrobbles after a track is done, it doesn't have 'Now Playing' support.
As for Deezer and Quobuz I'm not sure. Afaik Spotify still stands alone by being set-and-forget, working on any device and having full feature support.

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- ilikehurdles 2 days ago
  
  Qobuz works the same way. Set and forget. Don’t know about deezer.
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  corney91 a day ago
  
  Deezer is the same: set it and forget it once at a platform level.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies

moolcool 2 days ago

Missing last.fm support is the only thing keeping me from switching from Spotify to Apple Music

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wyre 2 days ago

There are 3rd-party apps that have near seamless Apple Music integration, at least on MacOS (Scrobbles for Last.fm) and iPhone (Marvis).

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twistslider a day ago

Yeah, this seems to be the case for a lot of people. I frequently get support tickets asking how to connect Apple Music. There are some alternative players you can use, but it's not really an accessible solution suitable for mainstream use

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Amorymeltzer a day ago

Other recommendations in other siblings, but Neptunes on macOS and Finale on iOS are excellent. I only got into it a couple years ago, but aside from a few quirks, using those two has been super smooth and easy.

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Semaphor a day ago

Could you use your fame to get last.fm to extend their API to allow listening number checks so it's not only people who registered with your bot? ;)

Also thanks for your work, while I dislike the spammyness of it, that's on the server owners (main server I'm on limits it to one bot channel)

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twistslider a day ago

Last.fm isn't really expanding their API unfortunately. You can however see Last.fm stats in the main artist/album/track commands.
As for spammyness, I'm aware this is an issue. For non-bot channels I recommend using .togglecommand and enabling just a few specific commands, and setting a small embed mode so .fm commands don't take up too much space in chat.

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squigz a day ago

Just one admin's opinion, but I think the bot spam thing is more a matter of server etiquette than anything. Sure, I'm all for #bot-spam channels, but nobody looks at those unless they're using it, so it's not very useful for things like sharing last.fm stats. I'd much rather people use it sensibly in a #music channel.

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