This installment of overthinking yet again revolves around music, but this time it’s about keeping a long-term record of what I choose to listen to over time. (This was partially inspired by wanting to have my own version of a Spotify Wrapped that didn’t require Spotify!)
A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to keep a consistent play count and record of what I’d listened to over time, that wasn’t solely dependent on my PC. I’ve reinstalled Windows, corrupted things in Windows, and changed hard drives out frequently enough in the past that I’ve had to recreate my music library data quite a few times before. Also, I don’t only listen to music on my PC, so using an external source that could collate data from my PC, my phone, and any manual additions, seemed to be the best approach.
Last.FM was the main tracking service I’d heard of, and it seemed trustworthy because of having been around for such a long time, so it felt like a good choice. I signed up for Last.FM in December 2021 and, at first, I really liked using it. My media software of choice, MusicBee, has a built-in Last.FM feature, so automatic scrobbling (the Last.FM term for ‘keeping track of a song being listened to’) from my PC was easy. I enjoyed the recommendation mix and radio, as they gave me a way of discovering new music that wasn’t attached to a streaming service.
The listening statistics were also fun to use, as they covered both global and personal stats. Being able to look up an artist or album and see which of their albums and tracks had the most listeners was interesting. But being able to click on an album and view my play-count of each song from that album, and to click on a song and see each time that I had scrobbled it, was a whole new level of data to enjoy.
However, some issues with the data powering Last.FM became apparent very quickly. There are multiple listings for many albums, and these are often full of mis-spellings, extra information that wasn’t part of the name, and extra or missing tracks. (While it’s probably not the worst offender, Last.FM records Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as being part of over 490 different albums). Artists with the same name are lumped together, sharing the same biography article and being linked to each other’s tracks.
Looking into these issues created more questions than it answered, as the information given by Last.FM staff showed something was amiss. For example, there are long-term issues with songs redirecting to the wrong artist (an example that comes up often is that songs by Noah Cyrus will always display as being by Miley Cyrus). On the support forums, the staff pinned post states that new corrections and redirections cannot be added as the result of issues with re-platforming the site… in 2015. This post is still accurate as of 2023, as the comment pictured below shows. So, on a site where the main goal is to accurately track music listening, music is stuck to the wrong names or artists.
To make matters worse, the only way to edit or correct the data you submit is to be a Pro member. In other words, the database is broken to the point where even the staff can’t edit it, but individual users can pay for the privilege of manually correcting their own data.
After a few months of using Last.FM, I grew frustrated with having a listening history that didn’t match the versions of albums that I had, and that sometimes split songs up across multiple versions of albums, so I started paying the £3 a month for Pro in order to make my scrobble history and library more accurate. I also discovered openscrobbler.com, which allows users to manually scrobble albums they listened to offline and to choose a specific version of a release from the Discogs database. Using openscrobbler helped me do the part I found most important – tracking the music I listened to on my mp3 player at work – but didn’t solve everything. As the data from the releases found by openscrobbler could still sometimes be inaccurate or incomplete, I still needed to manually edit some tracks in Last.FM afterwards.
I stuck with this clunky-but-functional system for about another year, until I realised that the issues with the database were unlikely to be fixed any time soon, and that there had to be a better system. I had fallen into a trap of paying to cover up Last.FM’s flaws rather than paying for enjoyment or practicality. This annoyed me, and became the main catalyst for switching to ListenBrainz. ListenBrainz was my first choice of alternative because I had already contributed data to its sister project MusicBrainz, a crowd-sourced music-release database.
The obvious question there will be why I’m moving from a site that requires me to manually edit data to … another site that requires me to manually edit data. It’s simply because of what spending that time means, and what it results in.
Last.FM cannot do anything with the corrections you submit and the auto-corrections you set up; you are making the changes purely to make your own library and history tidier. A million people listening to the same mis-named track could be making their own personal corrections of it in their own libraries… think how much time (and money) Last.FM users are collectively spending to make up for the incorrect data. Also, the main beneficiaries of this spent time and effort are shareholders of Paramount, rather than the other users.
In comparison, linking a new track in ListenBrainz to its entry on MusicBrainz (and especially adding new entries for undocumented albums on MusicBrainz) benefits every other user of the site, as well as every project that pulls album data in from MusicBrainz. (This includes, ironically enough, Last.FM). Also, while I’m not quite sure of how the legal aspects work, I believe that the company than runs MusicBrainz and ListenBrainz is structured in a way that prevents someone from buying it out and locking up the data behind a subscription or paywall.
For me, spending time on collecting and editing data for the collective good of a crowd-sourced platform makes far more sense than spending time and money to patch up the stagnation of a corporate entity. Using that logic made switching systems seem unquestionably superior to staying.
After spending some time testing ListenBrainz by importing my Last.FM history into it and checking how the tracks came across, I have now switched over to only using ListenBrainz. I can keep track of listens on my PC thanks to a plugin for MusicBee and I can track podcast listens on my phone using the same app that I already used to submit scrobbles to Last.FM, so these aspects were easy to switch over. The only annoying change to my routine is that I now need to use the MusicBrainz Picard tagging software, instead of the openscrobbler site, when I manually submit listens. But the upside of using Picard – that I am submitting a listen of the exact version of the album that my local files are mapped to, guaranteeing that the data will be accurate and consistent every time – outweighs that inconvenience. Also, as there is no time limit for submitting past data to ListenBrainz, I can save weeks or months worth of listening records up to submit in one go.
Update (Nov 2024): As of a couple of months ago, users can now submit track and album listens manually through the ListenBrainz website, resolving the one annoyance I had.
So, overall I am very happy with using ListenBrainz, despite missing some aspects of Last.FM’s input options, statistics, and recommendations. My annoyance at Last.FM’s organisation and staff has also softened. Thinking about it more, the staff are sort of in the worst of two worlds. While they are technically part of a big corporation, and they receive all of the distrust and the detriment of the doubt that comes from being attached to a corporate name, they don’t have the funding or support that parts of a big corporation normally have. In fact, the ‘staff members’ team in the support forums contains just 8 accounts. They have the budget and resources of a stretched indie team inside the shell of a corporate entity; an absolutely unenviable position.
I can consider this question successfully overthought, as I now have a slightly more streamlined system that I’m happy with. While I will be deleting my Last.FM account, as it is now redundant, I do admire that the site has persevered for so long. I really hope that the Last.FM team either recieve more support from Paramount to bring the site back to better use, or get a chance to return to independence.