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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

For me last.fm died (after years of being a subscriber just to support them, first during the "open for everyone" time and then during the "I'm from Germany and wouldn't need to pay" time) already. Scrobbling makes only sense for me if I actually do something with _my_ data. Which - I don't.

Listening to music on last.fm became unbearable after a while due to their inability to fix their product to distinguish artists by similar or the same name. ABS and A.B.S. is not the same. If there's both a punk rock band and a rapper with name "Foo" it probably doesn't make sense to mix them..

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> If there's both a punk rock band and a rapper with name "Foo" it probably doesn't make sense to mix them.

Damn right. And yet Last.fm does. An example: Felt. "There are three artists with the name Felt"[1]. I'm wondering if using MusicBrainz or another service they could manage to differentiate them.

[1] http://www.last.fm/music/Felt

I could see some sort of "disambiguation" feature like on wikipedia. So when I click on your link above, it could give me links to Felt (rock), Felt (rap), and Felt (classic).

I made up the genres, but the point remains. Then clicking on Felt (rock) takes me to last.fm/music/Felt(rock).

That's the easy bit :P Copy wikipedia, disambiguate by genre and/or country .

It gets harder when someone scrobbles a track by "Felt", to which artist do you attribute it? There's a whole host of problems like that to solve too.

Yes, I've been scrobbling using audioscrobbler/last.fm since 2004 and this is quite bad for the experience. I've been listening quite a lot to a german dnb act called Panacea ( http://www.last.fm/music/Panacea ) the latest month. In my listening stats a picture of an american base hip-hop group shows up. Take a look at how Discogs (one of the best services I know) separates their artists with similar names ( http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea , http://www.discogs.com/artist/Panacea+%282%29 ).

It's not ideal, but artist-disambiguation is also a non-trivial problem to solve. The effort of which needs to be balanced against a) how many people it affects and b) what else needs doing.

It's not hard to disambiguate, especially since there are free databases like MusicBrainz that already do that for you, and especially since Last.fm is already using that data.

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