# The new Last.fm beta site



## Anorion (Oct 20, 2015)

So a question Im asked frequently, is why use Last.fm when YouTube can pretty much deliver all your music needs
you can play entire albums
it continues playing similar artists
so what is so special about Last.fm? This post is an attempt to answer that question. 

Last.fm used to be a music service with two tiers. The free tier tracked all your listens on a computer, pmp or mobile phone, a process known as scrobbling. Tracks, artists, albums were all tagged by the first wave of users. You could listen to radio stations based on artists or the tags, which could be anything, "zombie slaughter music", "sleeping music", "songs.pk*", "female vocalist", "awesome" are some examples, it didn't have to be a genre**.  The paid tier allowed playlists, as well as some advanced lab options, which spat out cool infographics, the best one I can remember was a tube map of your listening habits. This site was one of the pioneers of the concept of "API". The site also kept pretty much the closest watch on what music was being listened to... as against what music was being sold. There were trending artists, recommended artists, the geolocation pointed out concerts you needed to attend, and they published charts at the end of the year which were always a good summation of what had happened that year in music. The site has had a troubled history with India in the past few years, the subscription service which was available in India initially was withdrawn, and later re-introduced, and then taken away again from everywhere else as well. Anyway, all of this is gone now, the site has substantially changed. 
The scrobbling remains, and they have built a new site around the new listening habits. Their core service remains the same, a large database of everyone's listening habits, that everyone can use in any way they please. They have a brilliant API that is used by individuals to make cool infographics based on listening habits, to pretty much all the biggest companies in this space as well. Spotify, Google, Soundcloud, Deezer, Rdio, 8Tracks all plug into it. There is a scrobbler for mobile and computer platforms as well. It is not competing with anyone, it is platform agnostic, it is service agnostic, and all it is doing is listening to you. 

This is the entire listening history. You can dive into it from a random year, down to particular days.


Spoiler



*i.imgur.com/oMkdZWj.png


*i.imgur.com/hNKvcRC.jpg



If you play an album, the entire album plays back. If you play a song, the track plays back. A YouTube video is loaded in the corner of the screen for this playback. Some tracks and albums that are not available yet, don't have the play option. 


Spoiler



*i.imgur.com/ktQ3kgX.jpg

*i.imgur.com/4cSSdHq.jpg

*i.imgur.com/KVZiqXJ.jpg



And now the site is streamlined, it plugs into YouTube, plays what you want, and shows you all the data in an immediately useful manner. There is no file manager with albums sorted by genre and artist. There is no carousel of store purchased albums. You are presented with whatever you have listened to, when you have listened to, and you can simply play all or any of it. It is like you are suddenly given ownership of everything you listen to. Nice and Simple. 

Oh yes, have to answer the question also. When compared to YouTube, you can also play entire albums on Last.fm. Mostly. Last.fm does not play one video of the entire album then scrobble each track from it though, it plays back individual songs from the album off YouTube, the best it can. This is not always perfect***. Don't know what happens if you use the chrome scrobbler then play youtube video of an entire album. Last.fm also plays similar artists and recommendations, and I have nothing but personal opinion to say why this is better than the automatic playback on YouTube. All I got is that Last.fm does this and only this, and the way in which it tracks songs and which songs are played after which song is available for public scrutiny. Like the people also have all the data that Last.fm is working with. Additionally, you can listen to libraries of your friends. 

We truly live in magical times.

The API seems to have changed, so the old visualization apps are no longer working. Making a list of still working ones. 
Scatter.fm
mymusichabits.com



* It is very easy to spot music pirates on this site . It is publicly available information. 
** These tags are still available, and the radio station for them as well, just navigate to /tag/<tag>. 8tracks does a good job of allowing you to mix and match up multiple tags. 
***so you are liable to run into some live recordings and cover versions in the middle of listening to an album, but it is a new site, and the kinks are being worked out. This is the only difficulty I have encountered so far.


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## Anorion (Oct 24, 2015)

*i.imgur.com/S0nEpQ2.jpg
Time and Genre slider.

What is being listened to right now. Each bar is a track, the height is the number of listens.
*i.imgur.com/WMyh130.jpg

*i.imgur.com/EpgeMFn.jpg


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## Vyom (Oct 24, 2015)

I am not an audiophile, but do tend to listen to music at random hours. And even when I knew about last.fm a lot in past, I never gave it a good chance.
Looks like the best option for people who want to try different genres of music without being on a hunt.


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