Bye-bye, Last.fm

I've long been an advocate for registering the fact you just played concerto X or symphony Y with a web-accessible store of data, such as Last.fm. I've been doing precisely that with everything I've played since January 8th 2008, so Last.fm have a record of about 14 years of my listening history. The thumbnail at the left shows you that's quite considerable: 202,000+ "scrobbles" (i.e., a record of the completion of a 'play') have been received in that time,

My top 'plays' as recorded by Last.fm are (in descending order) Britten, JS Bach, Vaughan Williams, Handel and Sibelius -which isn't so hugely different from what has been recorded on this very website since June 2021.

The trouble with the way Last.fm 'counts' a play, however, is that it is done per-track: so a 90-track Handel oratorio is recorded as 90 separate scrobbles. A four-movement symphony counts as 4 separate 'plays'. The "200,000+" play count the site says I've made in 14 years is thus wildly overstating things -though it is also true that if you use Semplice to 'merge' your per-track recordings into per-composition ones, it then undercounts, as the entire 4 hours of Götterdämerung counts as a single 'play'!

For the past 18 months, I have scrobbled from Giocoso both to Last.fm and this very website, just to keep the continuity going with Last.fm, though I have long-since found it much more revealing to read my play statistics here, because Giocoso counts plays 'properly', per composition, regardless of how many tracks it might be comprised of. It is now time to draw my dalliance to the increasingly-inaccurate Last.fm way of counting to a close. You will note by clicking on the thumbnail to this post that I haven't scrobbled anything new to Last.fm since November 10th 2022, for example... and I intend to scrobble nothing further. Indeed, having once taken a backup of my Last.fm account data, I intend to delete my Last.fm account altogether: my listening history is better recorded here than there, after all.

It is possible that I may be able to manipulate the backed-up Last.fm data into a form that Giocoso would be proud to have produced -but looking at it, it's very messy and pretty nasty and I think trying to do anything very useful with it is a fools' errand! If I can do anything useful to it, I will and I'll somehow contrive to display the data here (updated to add: I did!). But my Last.fm days are definitely done! I still think it useful to keep a record of what music you've listened to, so you can spot patterns and gaps and use those observations to guide you in your future listening... but Last.fm is not the best way of doing that for classical music listeners, at least.