Music Analysis with Last.fm
Streaming services are both a blessing and a curse. Loving music the way that I do, I love that there are hundreds of millions (billions?) of songs out there that I can play on demand, to my heart’s content. But it can also be a shallow experience. You take the music for granted.
If you use Spotify, you’ve probably seen their Wrapped feature. If you haven’t, what it is is basically a year-end presentation of your annual listening habits. It will also generate a playlist of your top tracks (which you can add to your library).
This is a good start, but it does not come anywhere close to Last.fm‘s ability to build a story around your streaming music listening history. But wait, what exactly is Last.fm? Well if you are curious and would like an introduction, please watch this video first:
So if you take a look at my Last.fm profile, I’ve been scrobbling, or tracking my online listening, since January 7, 2008. Although most of my listening history is from Spotify’s platform, what is really cool is that Last.fm can track your listening history from multiple platforms — including YouTube. At a quick glance, Last.fm doesn’t look so special. You have not only an area for your recently played tracks, but also your top artists and top albums. Also there is an area that shows your followers and who you follow (which opens up the opportunity to be social — but I admittedly don’t do this too much!).
But the real gold is when you get into the ‘Reports’ area. So let’s check that out…
Impressive, right? And if that isn’t enough, there are also other sites that really dig into your Last.fm data to give you even more information; like lastfmstats.com, where I grabbed the chart below:
Or MusiPie, where I generated this super cute graphic:
And these aren’t the only ones. The Last.fm API is very accessible and friendly and easily implemented into various widgets. The list of recently played tracks on my music page is driven by Last.fm data.
So full disclaimer, I do have the ‘Pro’ plan on Last.fm — but I’m not sure if it is really needed. I just feel good supporting the site. Plus I feel a sense of nostalgia/security from knowing that the site has been around for 20 years and is still in existence. And for good reason — there really isn’t another site that scratches the itch for deep music analytics like Last.fm does.
So check it out, you won’t regret it!
