I stopped using Last.fm a while ago for reasons I can’t explain without using the shrug emoji. From discovering new artists using recommendations to having a pointless competition with friends about your total number of “scrobbled” songs, as well as starting to dabble with APIs and building fun stuff, I used to love Last.fm. Today I ran into a post from Niléane about her Last.fm profile and it made me wanna write about it.

It’s really not clear to me if Last.fm is still alive and maintained, all I know is that it’s owned by Paramount, but that doesn’t tell us much. Some signs, like the fact that the footer still mentions Twitter and not X or that there has not been any updates since 2022, make me think that not a lot of updates are happening, which is a little sad, but if things are still working..? As I’m feeling nostalgic and I want to believe, I’ve signed up for a Pro Account. I guess we’ll see in a year if that was a bad idea or not?

At the risk of sounding corny, I started using Last.fm during some very transformative years of my life. It was around 2007 when I left home to go to college (or, the French equivalent of college I guess) and met a lot of like-minded people (= nerds like me). We shared a lot around music and interesting products, although I’m sure that if you asked those people now, it would be more about rescuing me from my terrible taste in music and patching a few holes in my culture.

At the same time, I started dabbling a little bit with REST API and started building tools around it. One of the projects I submitted at the end of a course was a mashup of Twitter and Last.fm to send tweets to your followings. The app used Adobe Air and Flex, which I loved at the time and was using at work to build various projects.

At some point, I even worked on a library written in ActionScript 3 because I wanted to be able to add native support for scrobbling in a music player. The code is most likely gone but I was able to find a screenshot I shared on Facebook ~15 years ago:

I remember the Last.fm blog being interesting as well. It’s where I got concepts such as “If it moves, graph it” engraved into my brain forever. I mean, do you see how cool the room looked as they were releasing a new version of Last.fm? I remembered this earlier this year, so I had to track down (in a non-stalking way) the author of this quote, Laurie Denness to get his email address and send him a thank you note.

I’m not exactly sure why I decided to write this blog post except to tell you that I just started to scrobble on Last.fm again. You should come back too and add me as your friend. Our compatibility is probably low right now, considering I haven’t scrobbled anything since 2015, but I’m sure we’ll make it work.