Last.fm died (as in for me personally) when I stopped cultivating my own music library. I used to have gigabytes of MP3s and FLACs, all neatly organised into folders, usually by artist/album, and meticulously maintained ID3 tags. All played through software like Winamp with the audioscrobbler plugin, or iTunes when I had my beloved iPod classic.
All of that drifted away as I got older, and the dawn of streaming services like Spotify came onto the scene. I'm not sure where my music is now, probably on a hard drive somewhere, dumped amongst other junk.
I think spotify used to come with last.fm support but I think I just lost interest in the whole thing, I don't consume music in the same way as when I was a younger man.
EDIT: Just logged into my last.fm account and it looks like the scrobbling still works from spotify, so it's been scrobbling all this time, probably for 10+ years without me logging in!
I've used Spotify (and other streaming apps) for years. I finally got tired that there was no streaming app that:
* Worked well with Sonos
* Provided high quality music
* Had good automatic caching of music *note below*
I tried Spotify, TIDAL, and Apple Music before giving up and putting my library on Plex + Plexamp.
*note*: Why is Spotify SO BAD when it comes to caching. It's so strange. There are so many situtations where it doesn't work, but it should.
I have the entire contents of an album (but not the album itself) on playlist. The playlist is downloaded offline. Spotify doesn't let me search or play the songs in the album unless I navigate to the playlist.
If I just played a song on data, and I lose my connection and try to re-play it, Spotify won't let me! Does it really not maintain a cache of songs that I played three minutes ago?
Search becomes entirely useless when you're transitioning from WiFi to mobile data. This happened to me _every_ _single_ _time_ that I would get into my car and start music before driving. Spotify would refuse to let me do anything until I disabled WiFi.
Spotify has to be one of the worst widely used applications.
Does it really not maintain a cache of songs that I played three minutes ago?
My beef with Apple Music is that they can’t even be bothered to cache the whole song that you’re listening to.
The number of times that I’ve started playing an album on my phone then had it stop the instant I drive out of WiFi range. You had a whole minute to download three megabytes over fibre and didn’t even bother. 5G is ubiquitous and perfect everywhere, right? It sure is in the Bay Area where all us apple engineers live, so how about we cache, say, one second of audio in case somebody goes through a tunnel or something.
I only ever used Last.FM for stats/tracking purposes, and it still does that great across platforms. I have an android app which reports music from any media app I use, and similarly have a chrome extension for desktop. I still find it incredibly valuable, knowing what I listened when, get breakdowns and so on. How else could I tell which were my top 5 favorite artists in 2013?
I still have that 100GB+ music collection on my laptop, all curated by myself (with the help of last.fm), organized in folders and with proper ID3 tags, which I spent years building when I was young and had no better things to do.
And you know what? This is the very reason why I never got on spotify or any of that stuff. I just don't see why I would give up the perfect (for me) collection and use some online service where I have no guarantee that I could even listen to the same track a year later.
I have music that I like and listen to, and I like to keep listening to it.
In addition to a large mp3 collection, I am also buying CDs and vinyls. Everything I can to build my own music library. The only online service I use for listening is YT, which has some unique content (live shows that are not found as albums) - but even these, I tend to download and save, because you never know...
I had it the same way. I even built my own playback statistics service since Last.fm/Audioscrobbler were too limited to my taste.
Then I just lost interest in updating my music library. Didn't want to pirate any more, I did buy a new CD every now and then but couldn't be bothered to do the EAC ripping + tagging even for them. So I kept listening to the old collection without hearing much new music. And then I switched to Spotify to get the new music conveniently.
Consider yourself lucky, Spotify scrobbling used to break for me almost weekly a few years back (but it has gotten way better, rarely an issue these days) !
All of that drifted away as I got older, and the dawn of streaming services like Spotify came onto the scene. I'm not sure where my music is now, probably on a hard drive somewhere, dumped amongst other junk.
I think spotify used to come with last.fm support but I think I just lost interest in the whole thing, I don't consume music in the same way as when I was a younger man.
EDIT: Just logged into my last.fm account and it looks like the scrobbling still works from spotify, so it's been scrobbling all this time, probably for 10+ years without me logging in!