Man i love last.fm even though it's been technically superseded (for most people) by Spotify's recommendation features.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.
- 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.
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 problem will be recovering from algorithmic poisoning from folks just scrobbling from spotify
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.
Sadly many years ago pandora bacame US only, so I couldnt use it (did not bother with VPN).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
But very nice ui, looks smooth and useful
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Besides, you can't leave comments under specific tracks on RYM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.