43
votes
Last.fm is now independent
Link information
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- Authors
- LAST.HQ, Jonty, frikandel, Winterbay, Zeroxysm, LQDAudio, jfourlc, por, spietsch, Scratchfangs, phuedx, kdspa, wileyfoxyx, goombrat, weewee87, Ko_tatsu, Xe4ro
- Published
- May 27 2026
- Word count
- 425 words
I have been using Last.fm for more than 20 years now and that in itself is quite an achievement for a service to live this long. It has somehow kept its distance to the usual enshittification of online services and its core functionality has barely changed at all. Which I have come to appreciate. It hasn’t been drowned in feature creep. It feels like a web service company from a completely different historic era and it somehow still exists.
This is very interesting news! I am curious how this will affect last.fm. I had already been side eyeing other open source projects, but I suppose I'll see where this goes.
I do find myself fighting with the intrigue of my listening history and data with my opposition for data collection. Lol Do I absolutely need to track my listening history? No, of course not. Though it is fun to go back and get a gist of your overall taste changes.
This news tickled my interest enough to dust off my 16-year-old account and throw them a year's Pro subscription. Whether that sticks or not will depend on what kind of direction they start moving in. I'm hoping they add back some social features like user groups and forums.
Agreed. I'd love the app to be more polished as well. I've been using Pano Scrobbler on my phone and desktop for awhile now.
I have not used Last.FM in ages. I skimmed the website and it seems like they are still doing the same song and dance - which is cool. Has anyone used it lately? How well does it work?
Aside from the personal listening metrics that last.fm provides, the biggest boons from the service are its album ranking and genre tagging.
Both are used throughout the world of open source media players to recommend popular tracks/albums for artists and to help fill in the gaps with where a release fits into the musical world. I use both quite often for my personal collection and listening habits so this is good news!
The continued threats lastfm has faced were some of the core reasons why competing services like ListenBrains/MusicBrainz were created.