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twistsliderlast Sunday at 10:03 PM3 repliesview on HN

Last.fm is still used quite a bit, mainly as a listening history tracker rather than a radio or recommendation engine.

Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling. For everything else it's a lot more DIY, usually with third party tools at the device level.

A big reason it’s still relevant is the ecosystem around it. The API hasn't really changed in 15 years, which makes it easy to build tools where a username alone is enough. That kind of lightweight social integration has mostly disappeared elsewhere.

Today, the social / community side is almost entirely just Discord. Nearly every music related server has a bot that displays Last.fm stats. My estimate is that abut 10% of Last.fm their users are also active in Discord music communities.

(Disclaimer: I run .fmbot, a Discord bot that integrates with Last.fm.)


Replies

joecool1029last Sunday at 10:17 PM

> Spotify is still the only big streaming service with native platform-level scrobbling.

That's not true. It's missing from Apple Music but present in Tidal, Deezer, and Quobuz. It also works well with Plex.

A large list from them: https://support.last.fm/t/more-ways-to-scrobble/192

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moolcoollast Sunday at 10:59 PM

Missing last.fm support is the only thing keeping me from switching from Spotify to Apple Music

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Semaphorlast Monday at 8:10 AM

Could you use your fame to get last.fm to extend their API to allow listening number checks so it's not only people who registered with your bot? ;)

Also thanks for your work, while I dislike the spammyness of it, that's on the server owners (main server I'm on limits it to one bot channel)

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