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.
