Last.fm is now independent | Hacker News Reader

Last.fm is now independent

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822 pointstwistslider220 comments

last.fm is one of my very favorite services. It's rough around the edges in some parts, but I've gotten incredible value from it. A couple of websites built on it that I check out from time to time:

- https://lastfmviz.netlify.app/ - shows what you've been listening to as a grid of album covers. You can scroll down as long as you want. It's cool to look back and remember where I was when listening to specific music.

- https://lastfmstats.com/ - generates tons of rankings, line charts, racing bar charts, etc. A couple I like: "Artist streaks" (I listened to Pavement tracks 122 times in a row in August 2023), "Unique artists in a single month" (225 in July 2025) and "Unique weeks per artist/album/track" (good to identify what you're always listening to vs. what you listened to heavily in a specific time)

- https://pmcdonough8133.github.io/last.timer/ - shows your listening rankings by hours, minutes instead of just scrobble count. This really should be a default feature in the site, as some artists have average track length 2-3x times of others.

If you use Spotify, another site I've had loads of fun with is https://explorify.link/.

> shows your listening rankings by hours, minutes instead of just scrobble count

I've wanted to build something like this for a long time, cool (and unsurprising, really) to see it's already done!

Swans is my number 30 by scrobbles but 4 by playtime, which makes total sense.

If you're a Spotify user, you can get even more precise data by downloading your listening data. The website I linked gets data from MusicBrainz and tries to fill in the gaps with an average, but even then it gets some things wrong.

E.g. Fishmans - Long Season is a 40 minute song, but the website's considers it as divided into 4-5 parts. And you don't have to listen to the full song to get a scrobble.

In the Spotify data you get the exact number of seconds you listened to it. And it is surprisingly complete and easy to use too. With LLMs I bet you can load it into pandas and construct queries for any insight you want in seconds.

Nice tip, but I use YouTube Music. I just downloaded my listening history, looks like they don't include listening duration, alas.

Just this weekend I generated a really detailed breakdown from my Spotify dump, it's unfortunate they hide so much of the interesting stuff in a dump that takes a week+ to get access to: https://6fce3ff2.spotifyguy94-dashboard.pages.dev

The advertising profile was especially interesting since a) I don't think the brands expected anyone outside of their marketing teams to see some of these names b) I've had premium for most of the time I've used Spotify, but they're still putting in full effort on generating an ad profile in case that ever changes

Very interested to know how you built this; I'd like to see similar data for my own dump even though I quit Spotify some time ago.

Fuckkkk yes to Fishmans long season!!!

The middle one is fascinating. The first track I ever scrobbled is by an artist I have yet to listen to again in 22 years. Much of the longest gaps is taken up by bands I found or started to like due to Rock Band which came out around that time. Man I miss that too, we had 30 or 40 people over right after it came out and turned the house into a karaoke dive, right down to having to kick them off the couch the next morning.

My math is crap: 19 years.

a while ago I created this one, for when you want to listen to a familiar album, but can't decide which one: https://what-to-listen.chef-labs.deno.net/

Thanks for sharing lastfmstats, wasn't familiar with that one! Delightful and nostalgic seeing the listens sliced as they have

Give LastWave a try! My buddy built it back in college and updated it recently.

https://savas.ca/lastwave/

Generates a groovy wave chart of all your past listening.

That's actually one of the more polished sites of this genre, thanks for sharing!

Sent some waves to a couple of friends

Thanks for sharing, these are awesome ways to explore your data.

Man i love last.fm even though it's been technically superseded (for most people) by Spotify's recommendation features. It just fit so well in the zeitgeist of 2000's indie scene, microblogs, early social media.

I use it with Spotify to track my listens and sort by artist, album and the like. It definitely still has value, even for Spotify users!

Yep, member since May 21 2005 here, still scrobbling with Spotify. Don't think I've ever used any of the radio features on the site, really; even back in the 00s all I used were the WinAmp/Foobar plug-ins.

I would argue it’s still unparalleled for recommendations

I just think it's beautiful that I can see all the music I've listened to since 2005 (back when it was still called Audioscrobbler, before the Last.fm rename). And I never stopped scrobbling in all that time!

I love these kinds of stats and being able to see how my taste has changed across more than 20 years, since I was a teenager.

I do miss the old community forums they had integrated back in the day, though.

I just remembered that I met one of my best friends to this day through Last.fm. It was 2009 or so, and you could leave messages on concert pages.

I posted asking if anyone wanted to go with me since I didn't want to go alone, and she sent me a message.

Good times.

As a long-time user, I do enjoy seeing how my tastes have changed over the years and which artists and albums I play the most. I also tend to agree that the Last.fm recommendation engine was perfectly fine for my use case compared to the algo that Spotify uses now. https://www.last.fm/user/wyclif

Same. I have one or more gaps in there which I wish I could go back and correct. I feel like integration with the service is a must for any music thing I pick up, the most recent being this year, resurrecting my old iTunes library via Navidrome.

I second this. I started as an Audioscrobbler user before the Last.fm merger. I have tracked nearly every track I've listened to for 21 years. It's awesome seeing how my habits have changed over the years.

I love clicking on a random person's profile and seeing that they're actively using the account (as in, I can see they're currently listening to a specific song!) they've had for 20+ years. So cool.

I've felt a serious reduction in quality of recommendations from spotify the past couple years. Maybe I'll try last.fm

More than a feeling.

Pretty much all the machine learning recommendation engines that emerged in the Netflix era were doomed to collapse under their own weight over time for non-mainstream users because the some limited number of mainstream modes dominate as most statistically "optimal" across the total user pool. These algorithms are best in the early days, when they're still exploring the content space for good novel fits but eventually get trapped into deep, boring grooves that work really well for tons of non-discriminating users with similar tastes.

Separately, in real commercial terms, they're all fundamentally poisoned by business model objectives of highlighting cheap content or servicing partnership/advertising deals, etc. And that problem also becomes more and more prominent as the companies running them grow and become more influential and as they need to squeeze harder and harder for revenue growth.

It was basically just a long, winding, wildly expensive road back to broadcast radio programming.

It was a good run for a while, but we're long due for a new model.

The sad thing is that before Spotify bought the Echo Nest[1], they had hosted some of the coolest discovery demos for non-mainstream (in my case ambient/IDM) where you would feed it a youtube video URL and it would make a really compelling radio playlist based off it. i found so many artists i still listen to today by just sticking a video in there in the morning and coming back to the tab when something incredible popped up.

When Spotify bought TEN i considered moving my listening over, but the radio button we ended up with in Spotify and Youtube Music are huge disappointments in comparison, so corporatist and flattened to 1.5 dimensions, I always wondered how the magic was lost.

Bandcamp's feed (especially once you trick the UI in to showing you how to follow tags) is usually interesting to leave running but limited in its own way by the artist pool lacking mainstream tentpoles to jump off of.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest

Absolutely, you're hitting the same conclusions I've reached. The algorithms are optimized for the lowest friction users that just replay the same music they like over and over again and accept whatever the popular music is. If you're a user that likes music discovery you're fighting against the system to get what you want.

> over time for non-mainstream users because the some limited number of mainstream modes dominate as most statistically "optimal" across the total user pool

This isn’t true, YouTube recommendations when it chooses music are amazing (no idea if YouTube Music is good I mean the video site).

Spotify recs are intentionally recommending you things cheap to stream or that have been paid for. It’s not a raw rec engine and it’s not bad cos it’s collapsing under normies, YouTube is proof of that.

I don't really go for any of the spotify recommendations or algorithmic playlists, but I have great success with the weekly Release Radar playlist.

AFAIK, the playlist is only generated from artists that you've followed. It will pull in tracks from different artists that feature your followed artists as well, so you get some occasional drift, which I consider a positive.

I don't think the recommendation engines behind Spotify, Youtube Music, etc compare to the recommendations I got from last.fm over the years. The algorithmic ones seem to have a bunch of issues that bug me as a long time music listener and someone with a large music library.

- their memory is short as hell so you can listen to something for a while, stop and then it'll suggest it to you later as something to "discover"

- they are way too biased towards recently listened music and will replay things over and over if you're not actively managing your queues.

- because they're so based on what you have listened to (recently) they suggest things that are extremely obvious music no one is "discovering"

- they suggest the "top" songs from artists, albums, etc, it's very hard to get it to play a "deep cut"

- if you have a large library you'll inevitably hit playlist song limits and other things silently. Each service handles this differently, Youtube Music seemingly kicks things out of my library or liked playlists each time I add something else.

I've literally just gotten in the habit of never using the autoplay features and just starting whole albums from start to finish again because the algorithms annoy me so much. Youtube Music has been getting worse about it too where now it often ignores the music you chose to start a playlist and starts playing things you've listened to recently regardless of it doesn't match the genre/vibe at all.

I'm 90% sure that music labels pay to "put their thumbs on the scales" with these recommendation algorithms in order to push their "hot" artists. I wonder how many of these problems are a result of that.

We can never know for sure if this is or isn't the case, so our only hope for stuff we can be confident isn't this way is with foss / self host able solutions

Using the historical record that they absolutely did this, there is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not now doing this.

Personally I’m more suspicious of “classic” artists, where the royalty and songwriting picture might be very skewed behind the scenes. The corporate owners of Spotify favouring one catalog of, say, “70s music” versus another could lead to a long-term capture of that category with little reaction or awareness.

Hot artists, in my estimation, are more about bot campaigns to kick off and sweeten ‘hotness’ as they’re in an ongoing war against other talent of the moment (with shady labels on all sides).

Every popular spotify playlist has a bunch of good songs and then like one or two "huh?" songs sprinkled in. It's really obvious what's going on.

Spotify was advised of payola scheme in federal court in the US, unfortunately last month the judge ruled that the TOS prevention of lawsuits against Spotify is legal.

I switched to Apple Music to save some money and I find the curation and the recommendations to be significantly better than Spotify.

For me curation was better but I was really missing the ability to quickly seed a playlist with a specific vibe and build from there for specific moods.

That, and the desktop app and confusion between library and Apple Music streaming was annoying to manage. They need to unify that experience or split it completely.

yes, I dropped it because simply favoriting a song seemed to require streamifying my entire personal library, which I didn't want to do.

I've tried to switch to Spotify from Apple Music a few times because the common wisdom seems to be that Spotify has better algorithmic recommendations. But Apple Music "knows" what I like already, and Spotify never grabs me so fast that I'm willing to stick around for weeks training it -- and I suspect part of that is all of Apple Music's human-made playlists. Apple Music has hired a lot of good editors/curators over the years, and I haven't found any service -- including audiophile darlings Qobuz and Tidal -- that beats it in that aspect.

If I search for random songs Apple Music immediately starts suggesting similar songs. I'd prefer only added or liked music be used as signals.

Cannot call lastfm algorithm advanced in any sense. Just opened Amon Tobin page: "similar artists: Kid Koala and DJ Kush", which is an impressively shallow understanding of the last 20 (!!) years of his life, and this happened with almost every artist on the platform, because the average sum of tastes of every listener does not exist in reality. E.g. in the case of Amon Tobin, Kid Koala is the average of similarities between early albums and recent releases, which is just not true, his music cannot be averaged throughout his career. I love my Web 2.0 youth, but the average similarity algorithm doesnt deserve praise. Its not better, its nostalgia and lack of faang-style unlimited greed which confused with better quality

Edit: of course spotify-style recommendations are much much worse, I just mean that lastfm doesnt have good algorithm either because artists are not consistent in releases. What is an average between electronic cult classic "The last resort" and every other Trentemoller album in strict indie rock style? This average does not exist

do you know of a better recommendation algorithm?

RateYourMusic’s recommendations are solid

No, why it should prevent me from describing vast issues with current solutions?

I am unfortunately a bit late to this conversation but I've been building a music exploration website in my spare time, which has similar artist recommendations too. https://explore.band Still work in progress but curious to know what you think if you get a chance to try it

Checked with vast Amon Tobin discography with all his aliases as his discography is a very complicated edge case for any recommendation algorithm: Stone Giants/Figueroa is listened by people who like Amon Tobin but the former is pure indie rock and folk and should not show Amon Tobin itself but more something like Current93. Don’t know how to solve this issue but it but it break any recommendation algorithm for last 20 years

But very nice ui, looks smooth and useful

The other frustration I’ve noticed is that they key in very heavily on artist and specific “genre” designation as what feeds the recommendation, which is actually quite bad for anyone who likes experimental work.

I understand that if your recommendations are based on “people who like this also tend to like that” then you’re right in the strike zone. But that approach is basically agnostic to any property of the music itself. Suppose there’s a rock band that released a specific song where they’re experimenting with a new style that has an atypically (for them) funky/jazzy influence. If I say I want more songs like that I mean songs that fuse rock/jazz/funk, not more songs that fans of [rock band] are into.

I still think for new music discovery Pandora’s approach remains the best if you really curate a station for yourself. Apple Music has been good for creating very listenable playlists though, and their new AI playlist generator has been very fun. Surprisingly, YouTube also seems to have some secret sauce where they recommend a lot of interesting stuff that I’ve genuinely never encountered before. I suspect this is because there’s a lot more amateur and experimental artists on there doing weirder stuff and it’s able to find audiences for those in ways that the music-focused services have less visibility into since their catalog is so focused on stuff from the recording industry.

> If I say I want more songs like that I mean songs that fuse rock/jazz/funk, not more songs that fans of [rock band] are into.

I agree. There are bands where I'm not into their usual stuff but they have one or two songs that I really like. It'd be nice to drill down even father into specifics like "this one section of this one song" or even just songs that feature certain instruments or similar sounding vocals.

That's because the recommendation engine that Last.fm used back in the day was made the incredibly expensive way: the entire corpus was hand-tagged and cross-linked by humans atop an enormous CDDB. Last.fm, Audioscrobbler, and MusicBrainz (the association engine) were all linked together.

But Spotify has that as well. Tons of user curated playlists. And although user playback data is harder to parse through, it's also pretty straightforward to build some clustering algorithm where if you both like X then you might like Y as well.

Spotify is pay to win (play) - especially user curated ones playlists.

My theory is that they don't have the incentive. Apple Genius was ridiculously good at music discovery, too. I shudder to think how much I spent on iTunes songs via genius over its run. But now that apple/spotify/etc get my monthly dollars either way, there's no huge incentive for them to create the discovery systems.

The incentive (for Spotify) is to make you consume the least amount of media, since every stream requires CDN and Bandwidth costs, plus royalties.

The recommendations engine used them but it's main strength was it was primarily based on collaborative filtering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm).

Essentially if people who listen to many of the same artists/tracks as I do have discovered other things I have not, then those unseen artists/tracks become candidate recommendations.

It worked as well as it did because they had a user base of music fans with a wide variety of tastes. CBS ran them into trouble when they upset those fans by breaking the radio and by being perceived as too close to the RIAA.

The will need to get the numbers up, but I'm hoping them being independent again is a good sign.

> The will need to get the numbers up, but I'm hoping them being independent again is a good sign.

The problem will be recovering from algorithmic poisoning from folks just scrobbling from spotify

Just filter out Spotify entries. Scrobbles are tagged with the source.

Is that even a problem? If someone consumes a lot of algorithmic recommendations and you don't, wouldn't that drift you farther apart in the last.fm relationship?

If you really like Song X and Song X happens to be on a popular spotify playlist with a bunch of stuff you’re not into, you’ll start getting recommended all that other stuff on last.fm, no?

Well, the current last.fm "play your recommendations" is linked to spotify, so maybe you're right? Last.fm has gone through phases of no streaming, streaming, and partner streaming, and TBH I haven't used last.fm as a stream source in quite a while. I guess it seems possible that if they outsource their recommendation playback to spotify, you'll get spotify recommendations.

Outside of the spotify integration, last.fm doesn't have visibility into anything that isn't scrobbled AFAIK. It's based on user data only. You have "neighbors" who have similar tastes, which I think is calculated based on overlapping scrobbles (not sure if time-weighted, or just top listens). If we both start scrobbling with a limited amount of artists, and 75% of our scrobbles are the band Primus, we're probably going to be neighbors. If I decide that Primus sucks and start listening to Coldplay all day, our venn diagram overlap separates and we're not neighbors anymore.

Maybe the neighbors influence the recommendations, but playback is outsourced to spotify? I guess I don't really know. You can still browse neighbors though, and use their top lists as "recommendations", which should only be based on listening history.

I think pandora had the best recommendations - because it was based on real human input, not AI and not even "group think".

Sadly many years ago pandora bacame US only, so I couldnt use it (did not bother with VPN).

Yeah. 100% agree here. The Pandora algorithm was an absolute breath of fresh air relative to every other recommendation system. Just constantly surfacing new and interesting music that I had never heard of but was exactly what I liked. I spent so long hunting for info on how they achieved it and if their taxonomies had ever been open sourced.

The Pandora algorithm -- and Pandora's positioning -- is truly a product of its time. You'll want to look into the Music Genome Project (whose very name dates it; the Human Genome Project finished in 2003), but equally influential was the big labels' stranglehold on legal music distribution. When Pandora started and for years of profitability, they had no deals with major record labels, instead promoting small indie artists on the basis of their recommendation engine. If they were going to survive, that engine had to be _excellent_.

One really annoying example of YTM's algorithm is it (or whoever works on it) doesn't understand that a genre can have diverse sounds and instruments, so it will recommend songs that all sound the same.

Like if I start listening to house music, it will just recommend 100 songs that have organ 2 [0], even though house music is more diverse than that. Then it forces me to thumbs down the music, which also isn't what I want to do, because I have no idea what effect it's having on my recommendations. Is it just going to stop recommending house music altogether? Is it going to stop recommending songs with organ 2? Is it smart enough to understand that I just want less and not none? I do like organ 2, I just don't want to drown in it when I'm trying to find new music.

Or I will thumbs up a phonk song and it it just floods me with phonk remixes of pop songs.

Last.fm, on the other hand, seemed to have some way of towing a line of different enough without going too far. Both YTM and Spotify algos just do cookiecutter similarity.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq61C8gndjM

One of the most infuriating things about recommendations engines is the way they handle non-English music. Maybe it's not with every language, but as soon as I listen to a Dutch song; the engines will recommend me ALL Dutch music, regardless of genre.

> Then it forces me to thumbs down the music, which also isn't what I want to do, because I have no idea what effect it's having on my recommendations.

I feel this. Social media algorithms can be so complex and opaque now that I have to consciously consider what repercussions my interactions have. I have so little idea what interactions affect recommendations on e.g. Instagram that it almost feels random.

You know what I didn't expect?

That I would so well internalize the "big brother is always watching what you click, what you hover, what you rewatch, what you comment on, what you pause to read longer than average, what you favorite, what you thumbs-down, etc" default experience provided by facebook/amazon/youtube/streaming platform/short form video platform/etc

that when I stick my head back into 4chan from time to time (to see what the motorcycle thread is talking about these days, or get idea for a show to watch) it's a like a physical weight lifts off me as I realize that no one and nothing gives a toss about what threads I open, or what posts I respond to, or what images I save or post. It won't change any feeds in opaque ways. It won't pollute my recommends (jokes aside about how how the choice of website already polluted matters enough). It won't do anything.

Blew my mind when I put my finger on what I was feeling and realized how pervasive this sort of thing has gotten in most every big tech online product.

Great summaries. I also have a real affection for my last.fm discovery, and I think it had everything to do with "deep discovery" going deep into the related artists pages. It really shaped my relationship to music and my love of music discovery and I sometimes find I don't click with people whose idea of discovery is The Algorithm(TM).

I tried to import my music life into Google Music, uploading my lifetime of libraries there. When they wound that down I just lost trust in online services and now do it through Nextcloud, which honestly is pretty awesome imo. There's no algorithmic suggestion for better or worse, but none of the "who ordered that" style assumptions imposed on you by the system like those you outlined above.

Spotify recommendations are biased because user incentive and theirs don't align. They pay different royalties to different artists, they optimize earnings. Also, they take money to promote music and shove it down your throat.

And, they're starting to push AI music into recommendations, as well. Their incentives are not aligned with users or artists. The major labels were previously pretty OK with the situation, as they had a negotiating advantage against indies and could get better deals for their catalog, but I guess they'll come to regret that deal with the devil.

I’ve completely given up on recommendation engines from streaming services. It feels like they’re only good for creating background noise, not for helping me find music I actually want to listen to.

I’ve gone back to a very 90s approach. If I like a song from an artist, I check out the album. If I hear about an artist or album from someone, I listen to do. I’m also currently making my way through a list of the top 500 albums of all time to find some gems that I missed along the way. A streaming service is helpful for this to avoid spending a fortune or collecting a lot of music I don’t end up liking, but I treat the service more like a store. Apple Music works great for this, while Spotify and YouTube Music were a bit of a mess.

One problem for me with Spotify and similar is that I don't use them. I want to be able to track what I've listened to but I only use my own, personal library via iTunes, not Apple Music.

Perhaps I'm wrong and some of these other services will track that but I don't have any desire to use the full on streaming services.

You could scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz to track your personal library listens.

Yes, I use last.fm. My mistake, thought I said that. Instead I just launched into my anti-streaming bit :)

I loved how easy it was to scrobble from different music services. Haven't used it in years though so I have no idea if that's still the case. Stuff like that usually rots because it's not making someone money.

It is. It's super easy to do so. You can send anything via the API.

For me last.fm's value lies in the community aspect: you can leave a comment on any artist, album, or individual track's page. There's not a single other place on the internet where I can go to to see what the people think of a song I'm listening to at any given moment (apart from perhaps YouTube, but we all know what the comments there are like - last.fm attracts a more sophisticated crowd by nature).

Unfortunately they have recently taken a rather drastic step towards undermining this community aspect of the site by gating the comment (or "shout", as they call it) box behind a "SEE WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING BUTTON". Previously the top 5-10 comments would by default be visible on every artist/album/track page, but now there's an extra level of indirection you've go to go through to see or post comments. The move was never justified despite the vocal community's outrage on their forums [1], but I suspect it's got something to do with the site's poor performance, as previously comments failed to load about 30% of the time. Strange, yeah.

I've cancelled my Pro subscription a while ago as a result, but I'm excited to see what their independence from Paramount will bring.

[1]: https://support.last.fm/t/artist-shoutbox/117534

I think RateYourMusic also allows for commenting pretty much on everything (and it also extends to film and, IIRC, videogames).

It might not be as friendly as last.fm on the surface, but it is surely richer in content, and more diverse. It's a gem, and I hope Sonemnic (?) doesn't drive it to the ground.

For me it doesn't really compare: with Last.FM all I've gotta do is navigate to my profile and the song I'm _currently_ playing on Spotify is right at the top, I just click it and boom, I'm on the track's page.

Besides, you can't leave comments under specific tracks on RYM.

> I hope Sonemnic (?) doesn't drive it to the ground.

It already has. Between the worst kind of Reddit tier moderation, the extreme anti-scraping measure affecting humans (can only access album pages from artist pages here, I get 503 errors otherwise) and the hiding of its forum from public view, it's already lying on said ground.

The advantage of last.fm is that it doesn't host the content, so it doesn't shape the music you listen to like using Netflix would shape the content you watch, it's content neutral.

Wasn’t it more like SoundCloud?

I never used last.fm but I always assumed it was more like SoundCloud. It’s been a few years I don’t use SoundCloud though.

I’m proud to say that I’m still using it, connected through Spotify! 23 years and counting, and it pretty much captured 100% of my listening activity. It’s a gimmick, but a nice gimmick to have and to be able to look up my music taste over time.

I find the current recommendations from spotify or youtube music don't actually help me find new music very well. They just end up shoehorning me, instead of widening my options.

the previous owner doesnt appear to be mentioned in the post (or, at least, not easily found).

CBS Coporation (owned by Paramount) bought last.fm in 2007

Thanks. My first thought was "independent from what?". I'm a last.fm user since 2006 but never noticed any ownership changes.

So what exactly happened, did management buy the company from them?

Purchased and then completely ignored.

The only consequence from an insiders point of view is we suddenly needed training on the "Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" since last.fm was a UK company.

I guess thats better than being enshittified

Happy to see they mentioned their API usage won't change. Last year I was working on a small project (https://listeningfacts.com) around spotify's API but they decided to suddenly restrict access to it.

I was able to make it work with last.fm's API with no issue and they're more generous with the information they provide.

I've had the same experience. Spotify abruptly deprecated their recommendations API endpoint (https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/spot...). I recently switched to last.fm and am able to generate recommendations via their API just fine and without being a pro subscriber.

I also had the delight of finding my streams from 2008 still in my history after not logging in for several years.

Last.fm used to be special, but this was a long time ago. Just tried to login, recovered the password and seems that its just a tracker nowadays. In the past I could listen to music and drop a comment, meet new people, etc.

Came here to say the same. I don't even know what this product is anymore. The website makes it sound like its about music but there is no music? I'm lost.

The last time I paid for LastFM was some time in 2009...but the home page just isn't clearly telling me what the service offers.

Originally, it kind of worked like radio; it curated music for you, you could like, comment or skip tracks. It'd reinforce the algorithm, and you'd start finding great artists. I liked the Blues catalogue a lot, even though I was listening to reggae, ska, punk, etc. It just seemed they had the best music catalogue. I remember checking how big the catalogue was, comparatively with others, which was much smaller, but much, much better!

Today, we have Generative AI, generating an incomprehensible number of songs that no one will ever listen to.

I don't remember if I had to pay for Last.fm or not back then, but I'd definitely pay to have access to that old system.

Among the people I know still using Last.FM, it's somewhere between having statistics about your music, and a recommendation engine. It isn't about playing the music, you can do that elsewhere. But by having data on every single piece of music you've listened to, it can recommend music you will like, and potentially recommend people with shared musical tastes as well. There's a feature to compare your musical compatibility with others.

For me, many years ago Last.FM recommended this weird electronic band that I'd never heard of, with the strange name "Boards Of Canada". That Last.FM recommendation was responsible for introducing me to my 2nd most listened to band of all time (just behind NIN). 2026 is many hexagons, dandelions and an inferno later.

Are you ironic when you say you never heard of "Boards of Canada"?

I hadn't back around 2008 when Last.FM made the recommendation, nor do I think I'd made the connection with Film Boards Of Canada even though we watched those films in my primary school years during class time.

It was special way before playback was introduced. The tracking is the reason I've been using it for 22 (!) years.

It still has comments on albums/songs/artists, but most of the conversations are a bit dead.

I've still been using it since it's the best service (in my opinion) for simply tracking everything you listen to. Spotify does track the same thing but they don't really let you view the information the same way. For example, there's no way to view the list of your top artists ever like there is with last.fm (I just checked mine, it's: https://www.last.fm/user/[your username]/library/artists).

Hopefully the developers being unchained from CBS/Paramount can only mean good changes are coming to last.fm in the near future.

You can install your spotify and pull in all the data from Spotify.

https://github.com/Yooooomi/your_spotify

Have you checked out ListenBrainz?

I tried to log in, and I remembered my password, but it forced me to do an email reset anyway. I no longer have that domain/email, so I guess my data and access are lost also. Shame.

So CBS spun them back out as their own corp or did the employee's or someone else buy it from CBS?

Just declaring themselves independent without details doesn't provide much context. I feel like Michael Scott just declared bankruptcy.

see, to me, it feels like wuphf.com finding a buyer

Exactly, there’s very little detail here. I’ve been a user for a long time and had no idea they were part of CBS.

Also… independent? Come on, most businesses on Earth are ‘independent’. They don’t need “support”, they’re a business, they need a product to sell.

I’m a big fan of their no-frills service, but I wonder if their ‘independence’ will push them down the road of weird ads and entshitification.

I still use last.fm via Spotify. It is wild to see my entire listening history from 11th grade to present (20 years!). Always fun to poke through and see changes from one year or life phase to the next.

What a blast from the past! I met my ex-girlfriend from half-way across the globe on last.fm. Lots of fond memories of sharing music on this lovely platform.

My first anniversary gift to her was a pro subscription (whatever it was called at that time). I still "scrobble" via Spotify and its still the destination for my 20+ years of listening history.

I am not active on any social media except last.fm... Its crazy that when I die, my music taste is the only thing that will survive in the cloud.

Last.fm is my favorite service I've ever used, period. Been using it since the early days, met real people through its comments section, and generally never had complaints about the quality of recommendations, etc.

115,000 scrobbles: https://www.last.fm/user/whalesalad

I really only ever used it so that a girl I liked would be able to see what I was listening to. She commented on my page. We ended up getting together for a few years. I miss my youth.

I think Last.fm might have been a better friend finding and dating app than any of its contemporaries or anything that came after. Seems like everyone in this thread or anyone I know IRL has a story of making a good connection with someone via it. I know I'll always cherish the people I got to know on there.

Music taste is probably the all time best indicator of compatibility tbh. You can go to shows together. You can jam out in the car together.

I miss the internet of old, where you would meet up with a cute girl you met online and she turned out to be a 39 year old man from Wisconsin.

same tbh

Hey, we had some good times together you and me.

Sitting at 239,447, next to no scrobbling from 2017-2022, and I deleted my old account because of a piracy panic, so nothing before 2008. https://www.last.fm/user/YoshiSlen

Another alternative is listenbrainz [0], which is also self-hostable [1]. A smaller, lightweight, single user selfhostable alternative, and more about just the stats is Koito [2], and finally because obviously you want to scrobble everywhere at once, you can self-host Multi Scrobbler to scrobble to and from multiple sources at once. Yes, I like scrobbling ;)

[0]: https://listenbrainz.org/

[1]: https://github.com/metabrainz/listenbrainz-server

[2]: https://github.com/gabehf/Koito/

[3]: https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler/

Lol, I had no idea scrobbling was popular again. I'm the maintainer of a scrobbler daemon for linux that gets the track info through MPRIS and can send it to last.fm, listenbrainz and libre.fm. :)

https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler

I hope this is a good change for last.fm! I love the service but it's been trickier to use since I switched from Spotify to Apple Music.

Does anyone have a setup they're happy with for scrobbling from Apple Music across different types of devices?

On desktop devices, I'm using Cider.sh which supports scrobbling, and on Android I use Pano Scrobbler.

QuietScrob on iOS/iPadOS works pretty well - it seems any breakage is due to Apple silently changing APIs more than anything on the dev's end.

On Desktop (macOS) I use the official Last.FM app - however it's still a Rosetta 2 app which will be sunset in the fall :(

NepTunes on macOS is nice - and it (optionally) adds the current track info to your menubar.

I haven't found anything reliable for iOS, however.

Marvis Pro!

Sleeve on MacOS, last.fm app on iOS (have to manually check for new scrobbles every so often and it only counts songs from your library) and a web extension scrobbler for when I’m on Linux using the web version.

I wish Apple Music would support scrobbling to the Last.FM API like Spotify, but to get the ball rolling we'd need someone on the Apple Music team who can nudge it up the list.

Congratulations (I guess), but what does “independent” mean here? Who bought it from whom (and why)? Is it employee owned now? Is it transitioning to a foundation?

I love last.fm but never understood the URL structure naming convention. Why use a "+" instead of a "-" for every band page (e.g. https://www.last.fm/music/The+Beatles).

I thought Kebab-case is usually the norm, and I don't think I've seen the "+" in any other URL paths that aren't query strings. Any ideas why they formatted it like this?

I believe "+" is the URL encoding for space and they're just putting the band names into the URL before encoding (thus "The Beatles" -> "The+Beatles")

I've checked RFC 1738 and it's not the case. The only standard for "+" is:

> (RFC 1866) specifies that space characters should be encoded as `+` in application/x-www-form-urlencoded content-type key-value pairs (see paragraph 8.2.1, subparagraph 1).

From https://stackoverflow.com/a/40292770

RFC1738 is obsolete. RFC1866, referenced in that SO answer, is also obsolete.

But none of that matters, particularly, because lastfm are consuming the URLs, they know full well what "+" means in a URL submitted to their servers, and also they've been around for decades (well before the whole "use %20 instead") - why on earth would they change up their URL scheme when it's working fine?

I suspect it was an intentional choice so that artist names like Jay-Z remain properly separated in the URL, especially in cases of multiple-artist billings (ex. https://www.last.fm/music/Nas+&+Jay-Z)

The "-" character appears pretty frequently in song/album titles, maybe even artist names. There could be some sense in not using it as a substitute for space in this context.

There's still a ton of value in the historical recommendations on last.fm's site. What its future looks like, I'm not sure. I'd love to know who is going to operate it now that it is independent.

I'd recommend ListenBrainz for folks interested in similar tracking and some recommendations with clearer ownership.

For my own historical interests, I have a Navidrome plugin writing to my own API and surface charts across time periods by querying the postgres database it writes to.

I love Last.fm, I've been scrobbling for over 20 years now.

It's amazing to me that they have managed to stick around like they have. They're very much an "old internet" site, and I hope they can stick around for many many more years.

Yes. Audio Scrobbler was the thing.

Wow, I hope this is good news! I'm in my 21st year of scrobbling and still so obsessed with the stats. Just recently, I built a browser extension [1] to make batch editing more convenient and to get even more data about my scrobbles.

[1] https://github.com/hummingme/scrobblescrubbler

one of the very first programming projects I took on was to figure out how to scrobble the records that I was playing. It was my first exposure to so many things: Ruby, FFIs, audio processing, audio fingerprinting (I think I used echo nest ?). Ended up going to local meetups to ask for advice.

last.fm is one of those services that is from the pinnacle of the open web.

Clicked join: "Your request was blocked. To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe."

Linux, Firefox, uBlock Origin. Nothing else special. I've really been looking for an alternative too. Thanks for at least showing me what to expect before sign up. Guess I'll pass.

This seems like a positive step. It never made sense (to me at least) for CBS Paramount to own it.

Huge opportunity to allow folk to own their own (meta)data. /fingerscrossed

Last.fm & in particular audioscrobbling has been such an amazing joy to have in the world. Music is so important to me, and it's amazing having this system to help see over time what friends and I myself enjoy.

These days, for auduiscrobbling, I recommend folks use either teal.fm (which alas is somewhat DIY or find-a-friend for their API service) or rocksky.app. There's a better credible exit, as it's based on atproto/Bluesky protocols, and a richer world of apps & interconnectivitiws emerging.

And I try to "Start Now"

Your request was blocked To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe.

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Error 406

I think this is fantastic change and wish them the best, this is probably just a small hickup I experienced and I wil try again later.

BTW, I recently cancelled my youtube premium, it was just too expensive. Never was subscribed to Spotify, so I need different ways to listen to music.

Many many years ago I wrote a small platform to serve as an off-ramp for Last users. They had just been acquired and it wasn't going over super well with users. "What I listen to" (coworker suggested the name), shortened to wilt.

17 year old me had no idea what I was getting into. It was the best and worst project I've ever worked on.

A lot of respect to the guys and girls still working on Last and I'm very excited to see where it goes from here.

"The company has generated an operating loss for the year to 31 December 2024 of £690,252 (2023: profit of £1,509,544) and revenue of £2,215,381 (2023: £1,960,340). As at 31 December 2024, net liabilities were £45,506,488 (2023: £44,855,202)."

"The financial statements have been prepared on a going concern basis on the grounds that Paramount Global has confirmed that it will continue to provide financial and other support to Last. FM Limited at least for the next twelve months and thereafter for the foreseeable future to enable Last.FM Limited to continue to meet all its liabilities as they fall due."

I wonder what their financing plan is, and what shape this independence will take, whether Paramount is retaining a minority ownership take? Seems like they might just be able to scrape break even based on current revenue.

They have a lot of users paying to track their listening habits; I'm surprised.

Where did you get this quote? I can't seem to find the source

U.K. company accounts are public.

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Click “view PDF” for “Full accounts made up to 31 December 2024”.

I've used last.fm since the beginning and I still use it to scrobble. I hope it goes back to the more open api and the ability to more freely customize the profile pages like was possible back before last.fm 2.0 or whatever it was when they massively overhauled everything.

Is anyone using last.fm in 2026? This made sense when people were playing MP3s in their Windows Media Player or Winamp, but as 99% of the people just stream music now, what is the purpose of this service?

It has been maybe a decade since I met someone who actually uses the service.

My partner swears by it for the Data when scrobbing with Deezer (and formally spotify.) He pays for it.

I can’t stand streaming and wanted to get off all streaming services and now self host every single piece of my digital media. Last.fm is an important component for the music side of my services in order to use the last.fm api to track listens and provide recommendations.

I recently left streaming and started buying music again and in the process dusted off my 20 year old Last.fm account to begin scrobbling again

I really enjoy having almost 2 decades of my music listening history to play with + I use a couple different streaming services as well as vinyl and local playback, so it's nice to see my overall habits.

I still listen to the majority of my music as downloaded MP3s, but no, I do not use Last.FM anymore. I've become much more wary of being tracked and have no desire to give them information for free, much less pay for the privilege!

I still use it. I use the Pulsar music player on Android which has an Audioscrobbler built in. I have my entire mp3/flac collection extra compressed into opus files, so that my 120GB of music is only taking up 43GB on my phone. When I'm listening in the car or on the train I really can't tell the drop in quality.

I use it, set and forget for audioscrobbling since forever. And I still track gigs using it. Recommendations are still great.

It's still pretty popular among younger listeners, even if the demographic doesn't overlap much with the techy people who used it in the 2000s.

I don't see why it would have lost its purpose just because I'm now streaming instead of playing MP3s. It was always about the statistics for me.

Listenbrainz has been an excellent alternative for me.

Downside of it is like all Metabrainz projects they seem to intentionally go and make everything as utterly ugly as possible. It feels like someone there intentionally thinks up ways to make the worst UX possible.

I don’t see how LB has a worse UX than LFM.

The last time it was mentioned here, perhaps a couple of weeks ago, I tried to warm up my old last.fm account.

I once used it for a long time, but that time was maybe 20 years ago now. I wasn't even sure what my username, password, or email address would have been -- but I had some guesses.

So I guessed a few times. I guessed wrong. The wrong guesses apparently blocked me, since the sign-up page now always goes 403 for me.

When I tried with my pocket supercomputer instead, the infection spread to its signature as well: It 403s there, too.

Fun times.

edit: Tried again. It didn't work yesterday or the couple of weeks prior. But it worked the first time today. So now I have a shiny new last.fm account with no history. :)

Get in touch with LFM support, it's good. I hadn't used my LFM since 2011, but I remembered my old email address that was likely used with the account. I emailed support asking them kindly to reset my password to my new email, and they obliged.

Crazy. I might give it a shot. That era of my email is long gone, but I might be able to give them a very short list.

Sorry to reply twice. My previous reply is too old to edit.

I looked for contact info, but https://www.last.fm/about/contact only lists one email address and says not to use that for tech support. It says to use support.lastfm.com -- a forum -- for technical questions.

But I'm pretty unwilling to throw a bunch account data, even if it's already public and already very old, into one place for the bots to hoover up, ruminate upon, correlate, and then keep track of until the earth cools.

Any tips on proceeding?

I've found the support email address. It might still be open for support queries. If you send me an email I'll send you what I know. My email address is in my profile.

email sent

Time to revive my account... (scrobbling since 2003, heh) - started in audioscrobbler days, before last.fm

My usage has gone way down since switching to streaming services, this made me search for ways to backfill the data...

For anyone using Apple Music, looks like you can request an export of your data from privacy.apple.com, then use https://github.com/nerveband/Apple-Music-Play-History-Conver... to convert it for Last.fm import (haven't tried it yet, but looks promising).

Would be nice but it can't be done. I stopped scrobbling in 2011, then found out the site was still alive in 2024, one email to support later and I was back in.

I wanted to import my Spotify listening history from the intervening years, but found that the LFM API limits scrobbles to no earlier than two weeks ago. A shame, because my current listening history is now very skewed between the two "eras".

Congratulations to last.fm on this, although I'm not sure what I can do that actually "scrobbles" at this point. I went to their download page for the Mac desktop app, which somewhat forebodingly referred to "what you've been playing in iTunes" rather than Apple Music, and downloaded it anyway. It's an Intel-only app, not universal, and it doesn't appear to be signed, so macOS Tahoe screams about it being possible malware.

After going through the hula dance to open it anyway, it looks like it's working, but it sure doesn't look like it's received a lot of love recently.

Spotify scrobbles to Last.FM (it's built-in to Spotify as a setting somewhere, from memory). On Windows, MusicBee will scrobble everything you play through it. On Android, the Last.FM app can watch playback notifications of Android music apps that you select and scrobble those - the app itself doesn't have to have Last.FM support.

But I don't know about for Mac & iOS.

> it's built-in to Spotify as a setting somewhere, from memory

That setting has been removed a few years ago. It now works the other way round: You authorise last.fm to access your Spotify data.

There are a number of utilities like Neptunes (https://micropixels.software/apps/neptunes) that will do this for you on macOS.

I'm glad I kept using an Audioscrobbler since 2008. Right now I have it hooked up to Spotify, but I've used one with foobar2000 for non-streaming, and have found other players to have the functionality for the most part (at least the ones I've made use of). I even had an extension for Chrome and Firefox that would send the data from YouTube's website when I used to listen to music on there.

Happy they are independent and allowing access to their API. Seems like it may be time to work on a personal project to track the data in a way that matters to me, rather than just what you normally get built in.

Congrats to the team. Always a fan.

Scrobbles: 301,223 Scrobbling since 4 Jan 2007.

They were also the inspiration for https://artconnects.club

Like folks here in the comments mentioned last.fm was great for meeting people through music and mutual taste. I had many friends and great conversations with people that share my music taste. That indicator design showing our common music was a great deal. Now I'm building that to connect people through movies, series, albums and books. Displaying their common stuff. This is the way!

Great news! Related[0]. The presentation video in the linked article from 2002 is a gem.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266875

I'm mostly unfamiliar with the current offering of last.fm, but the name is familiar from way back. Glad to see something well-liked reclaim some independence.

At a glance, they're providing an interface to YT sourced content with some value adds around tracking or categorizing listening.

A quick question for users: can the site itself be configured as a listener without streaming / displaying the video? In general, YT has a lot of music, but the perf hit of streaming typically high-quality video as well is a blocker when doing dev work on my main machine.

You can toggle between YouTube and Spotify as the default playback provider.

Note that you do need to be a premium Spotify user for it to work. That's not needed for YouTube, so that explains why YouTube is the default.

I'd be way more sold if I could pass in a static dump of my library music and get a handful of suggestions to demonstrate value.

Wild shot - but I wonder whether the newly emancipated Last.FM are looking to hire? I've loved the site since I got my old account back in 2024. Recently I created a fun widget maker using its API:

https://github.com/lordfeck/last.played/

If any of the team wants to reach me, my email is in my profile.

Unfortunately, unable to create an account on my laptop (WiFi) or phone (Verizon) - even in incognito.

> Your request was blocked

> To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe.

> Please try clearing your cookies and refreshing the page. > If the problem persists, try again later or on a different computer network.

> Error 406

edit: maybe they saw my message or fixed a bug? signup now works everywhere for me.

Excellent timing. I am currently working on a macOS scrobbler that (also) works with Last.fm, and supports music recogs from iOS, Apple Watch, and macOS.

https://actions.work/listening-post

(AFAIK, the official Mac scrobbler is dead by now.)

This is pretty amazing, I have been scrobblin’ for 23 years (pre-rename from audioscrobbler to last.fm), from Winamp and foobar2000 to iTunes to Spotify over the years - amazing to see them continue this service for the dedicated music lovers. One of the few services spanning decades of analytics - excited for the team!

I've moved over to ListenBrainz, it's quite nice and I like that the data is open and not trying to be monitized

Some previous discussions on this note:

Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web: 2002

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266875

Last.fm turns 20

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33722862

This is great news! I worked on the redesign and replatform with last.fm when they were part CBS Interactive. They were a lovely team of engineers and designers who cared about their product, and I appreciated their culture. Fun memories spending time in London with the team. Glad to hear they found a new home!

Wish I'd kept using my last.fm account. It's a shame that although Apple + Spotify both allow you to download your full listening history you can't upload it (and keep dates/times) to fill out your historical data. I'd start using it in a heartbeat again if they allowed that.

Looking forward to scrobbling again

Back in the day, was heavily influenced by last.fm for this BBC 6music GWAP mooso.fm

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2009/12/mooso.shtml

It was such a hassle exporting my data from last.fm to libre.fm when they were bought out in 2007 (and then all the founders left in 2009). But I'm glad I did it. While it's nice that last.fm is "independent" now, they're still for-profit and probably should be avoided.

I don't know if I even have an account anymore, its been like 15 years since I last logged in...

Me too. I tried loggin in, and after a forced password reset I am back, though back to 2018 it turns out.

On Spotify I made a playlist with over 4,000 songs from Last FM. I remember doing it but I couldn't say how I did it now. And also a "loved" playlist which I am revisiting now. First track Whitest Boy Alive: Golden Cage, a stonker.

Glad they're not changing the API! I'm hopeful things will get better with them regaining their independence.

Shameless plug: We run https://songstitch.art/ for collage generation.

I hope that means it will improve now. There's such a rich space of features that they could do. Had some hope with their experimental Labs but I remember being underwhelmed and not seeing anything about it recently.

Long may it continue. I've used Last.fm since it launched to keep track of my listening habits (albeit incomplete since iPhone) and all the gigs I've ever been to (complete to the best of my knowledge!).

This is very exciting. The music landscape is just as chaotic as it was back in 2007 (when CBS acquired Last.fm) if not even more complex these days. Can't wait to see what's next. <3

I fear that what's next is AI slop music, pushed by record companies so that no performers or songwriters need to be paid.

So lastfm become relevant again because slop will not appear statistically in user scrobblings because of vast amount of "musicians" required to be profitable: if I listen to 1000 AI artists with one track produced and Linkin Park then my average will be Linkin Park

I loved last.fm when every tag was a custom radio station..

It's not anymore, right?

This is awesome! Anyone know who the humans behind the new company are?

I have a history going back to 2012, which is great. I've always worried Spotify would stop working with last.fm, I wonder if this makes it more or less likely.

I honestly forgot last.fm was a thing. But good for them that they have independence now.

shame I cant recover my original account. When they sold to spotify I hadn't accessed my account for a good while so they just moved everything over and deleted it. It was a shame, I'm one of the OGs that signed up when it still was audioscrobbler, 23 years of historic listening data through the drain. Shame. (did i mention it is a shame? XD)

What a blast from the past. It was a pretty cool time to be a teenager in 04-06 with last.fm, MySpace, iPods, Limewire and music blogs.

i recommend installing a browser add-on like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-scrobbler...

Interesting! Hope they have a super lean team, and just focus on the niche, legacy web experience.

May be they will once again invest in their smartphone app.

I remember Last.fm's value proposition was 1) discovery and 2) community. (1) is (mostly, for most people) covered by "feed" algorithms of Spotify and YouTube.

I wonder how they're going to position themselves now.

a recommendation algorithm that isn't a box of pain they sell to advertisers?

To me, it always was the scrobbler. I've been tracking what I listen to for 15+ years.

As someone who used to hang out on various music forums...a human recommendation based on careful analysis of your last.fm scrobbles was infinitely more useful and accurate than anything Pandora/YouTube/Spotify/Tidal ever recommended me. Humans can infer not just what you like, but what you don't like.

Community largely died out already by 2012. Originally Last.fm enabled a lot of IRL socializing, connecting hipsters who lived in the same town and listened to the same music. Changes in music-listening habits, the atomization of tastes in a world where so much was available, and CBS not having a clue what to do with the site -- that killed Last.fm except for just a way to track one's own plays.

Anyone else music listening habits change in the past six months to listening to one owns AI Slop? My slop (been a real hobby songwriter of melodies & lyrics since a kid..decades ago) has the most meaning to me it’s just not me singing. Now it sounds pro and some ppl when I’m playing it actually like it vs. my own rough demos (guitar, vocal and added drums/bass via GarageBand). I actually don’t care if others hear my slop as it’s all my own ideas…words and melodies which have way more meaning then Listening to another’s music/songs.

I’ve been telling close friend about this and then I see this verge article saying in not the only one https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/n...

Love last.fm

may it live a long life

This is such great news. Instant upgrade.

i discovered so much music i love to this day thanks to their scrobbling or whatever discovery service was.

i’m talking like 2000s

This site blinded me at 12 AM

I’ve been trying for years to get my data off of last fm, and it has seemed impossible compared to other platforms

Listenbrainz has a page that allows you to fetch your history from last.fm, and knowing them, the scraper is probably open-source.

TIL last.fm is still around!

yay! I love last.fm so much and glad they can maintain the platform

No idea what last.fm is. Clicked the logo at the top of the forum, but that's one of those prank links that takes you to the page you're already on. Typed in last.fm manually and got

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