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RSS Feeds for Last.fm

129 points · 50 comments · Baljhin

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Baljhin · 1790737234 · focus · HN ↗
> "...Tell me your username and i'll give you (six) URLs..."
> (period can be: 7day, 1month, 3month, 6month, 12month or overall)
> Recent tracks
> Loved tracks
> Top tracks
> Top Artists
> Recommended tracks
> Recommended tracks in JSON format
<a href="https://github.com/xiffy/lfm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/xiffy/lfm
1. aworks · 1790823173 · focus · HN ↗
  I've been using xiffy last.fm feeds for awhile and am satisfied with the combo.
winrid · 1790743275 · focus · HN ↗
> But I also wept. How is it possible that two almost identical endpoints have the key names differ on several spots or complete absent.
average legacy PHP backend :)
1. dewey · 1790771676 · focus · HN ↗
  The PHP part is unnecessary there, any code base that's more than a hobbyist project will have these kind of issues.
  1. winrid · 1790780476 · focus · HN ↗
    It's mostly a legacy untyped backend thing.
    dewey · 1790781245 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure why we are nit-picking that but untyped doesn't mean legacy, and having fields that should be identical be called differently or missing across API routes happens to tiny startups, side projects and big corporates.
    winrid · 1790835760 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not the one nit picking
    Last.fm is an old php app
    talon8635 · 1790786528 · focus · HN ↗
    That not php fault. Maybe old ass versions of php or shot implementations. But strong typing is possible in modern php
cyberjunkie · 1790743925 · focus · HN ↗
Don't see any slop in the code. Good job!
msephton · 1790745743 · focus · HN ↗
Cool!
I'm wondering why recommended tracks are different between the two feed formats?
Also, json feed doesn't seem to validate or be served with proper mime type.
cobertos · 1790748858 · focus · HN ↗
Self-hosted Koito[0] and glad I left Last.fm.
Not even a good first-party export, gotta use some hacked together third-party one to get your data out.
[0]: <a href="https://github.com/gabehf/koito" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gabehf/koito
1. sha-3 · 1790752082 · focus · HN ↗
  ListenBrainz[0] is a decent alternative if you don't want to self-host. You can import your Last.fm scrobbles there pretty easily.
  [0]: <a href="https://listenbrainz.org/" rel="nofollow">https://listenbrainz.org/
  1. chneu · 1790752926 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of people run both koito and listenbrainz
    drpfenderson · 1790786078 · focus · HN ↗
    As someone doing exactly this, shoutout to FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler for keeping all my music databases in sync.
2. Godsend69 · 1790760786 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
TFNA · 1790752134 · focus · HN ↗
As mentioned in the HN submission, Last.fm went through a redesign already over a decade ago. It stripped so much functionality that the site became useless except for merely tracking one's own listens, and there were already libre alternatives for that.
Last.fm is one of my go-to examples of how the internet has become a lonelier place. The old Last.fm was deeply linked with real life: it would show upcoming gigs in your town along with members who might be attending, and you could easily meet people in your own location who shared your own tastes in music. Where does a person find music-related socializing now?
1. Mashimo · 1790752379 · focus · HN ↗
  Is it not possible to discover new artist you might like based on your taste?
  1. happymellon · 1790752567 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't see how this relates to anything the parent comment talked about.
    Mashimo · 1790760488 · focus · HN ↗
    He said it become useless except for tracking. For me it was a place for music discovery.
    IAmBroom · 1790788291 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel like the main thrust of his complaint was that he used it to connect socially. I agree that there are other ways to find new music, however,
2. meindnoch · 1790755417 · focus · HN ↗
  This.
  My best friend cold-messaged me on last.fm 18 years ago: "wanna exchange music? add me on MSN: ..."
3. soleman · 1790761232 · focus · HN ↗
  > You could easily meet people in your own location who shared your own tastes in music. Where does a person find music-related socializing now
  I'd say Instagram serves the role of Last.fm you described (for better or worse). But really you can just go to the gigs and talk to people. That's guaranteed people in your area with similar interests.
  1. phrotoma · 1790767159 · focus · HN ↗
    This is true, and I hate it. All the local DJs I enjoy post their gigs on instagram and nowhere else. All the fans I know use instagram to get updates about where the shows are happening.
    In practice I just wait for my friends to tell me where the music will be, but I also hate the whole setup deeply and want instagram to die in a fire.
    input_sh · 1790768736 · focus · HN ↗
    Be the change you want to see in the world.
    No seriously, like 18 months ago I solved this exact issue in my corner of the world by simply creating a static website and putting them there on a calendar and now I'm like a microcelebrity of my own running a "brand".
    101008 · 1790768893 · focus · HN ↗
    I want to do the same but I live in a big city (millions of people). How do you recommend approaching this? There is no board/calendar that would get the attention of thousands of people and without that it's useless in a big city.
    input_sh · 1790783614 · focus · HN ↗
    > There is no board/calendar that would get the attention of thousands of people
    What makes you think that? Google/chatbots need a crawlable source. Instagram content is not a crawlable source. Be that crawlable source and they'll send the traffic your way. I get thousands of monthly visitors from Google alone. The next step is to make them sign up for a weekly newsletter.
    I'd also suggest a giant "purchase ticket here" button on every event page and measuring how many people click on it, it's infinitely easier to approach the organisers when you can easily whip out that statistic on your phone.
    dv35z · 1790797945 · focus · HN ↗
    Check out Austin Texas <a href="https://do512.com" rel="nofollow">https://do512.com for inspiration of music/event trackers. Personally, I think a "Whitelabel"-able version of this, ready to be localized to a city/town, would be cool - especially if it generated custom calendar (iCal). I checked out potential alternatives, and really didn't seem much out there - especially that would be attractive/stylish to music fans.
    d3Xt3r · 1790849884 · focus · HN ↗
    We're a small city so not sure how effective it would be for you, but <a href="https://theimage04.com/" rel="nofollow">https://theimage04.com/ was pretty revolutionary among the music circles here. Most people I spoke to loved the old-school newspaper classifieds vibe, and that there's no Web 2.0 bs.
    You could do something similar and then print out physical copies of it and hand over a few to local music venues, cafes, pubs etc to spread the word.
    TFNA · 1790772904 · focus · HN ↗
    Today young people of the age for which Last.fm was once popular, are overall unlikely to use the open web. They only use dedicated phone apps. A static website would be unnoticed by them, and even if their attention were drawn to it, it would feel like effort to frequent it.
    phrotoma · 1790846516 · focus · HN ↗
    I started mine last summer but gave up a few months ago. I just couldn't stand looking at insta every day to surface updates, and when I wrote a scraper (read only - no likes, comments, or posts) to do the job for me my account got banned for bot activity.
    Fuck instagram.
    Mashimo · 1790769862 · focus · HN ↗
    Are they not also on Resident Advisor?
    I think it's possible for 3rd parties to add to Resident Advisor.
    I also dislike Insta only events. I still have facebook where I follow up on some venues. But just a few websites with calanders would be coolio.
    phrotoma · 1790846570 · focus · HN ↗
    RA is great for big cities but mine is too small for them.
    soleman · 1790770812 · focus · HN ↗
    I also hate meta but unfortunately it's where many scenes live. Path of least resistance for venues, artists, to share their shows. I would disagree with the other commenter who said to "be the change". I've seen dozens of event aggregating sites and what they all lack is actual people using it. We live in Meta's hell, but everybody's there (speaking as Gen Z).
    This is avoidable if you have a specific niche though. A lot of groups online and in cities give me hope. What kind of music are we talking here?
    phrotoma · 1790846621 · focus · HN ↗
    EDM primarily. House, drum and bass, and dubstep seem to be the most common around my area.
    soleman · 1790854467 · focus · HN ↗
    For those sounds, I'd stick to resident advisor and following the DJ's you like. Also check out Rinse FM for artist discovery if you're open to the British sound (they invented d&b and dubstep). Massive.
4. raffraffraff · 1790763663 · focus · HN ↗
  I used to live Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music
  rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)
  1. TFNA · 1790763862 · focus · HN ↗
    Listing every issue of an album in every country and every format is precisely what Musicbrainz was founded for (as a successor to CDDB). Any social features are just extras on top of that.
    raffraffraff · 1790884437 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're interested trainspotting individual CD serial numbers, then there's nothing quite like it. But my gut feeling is that there's a lot of folks with digital music collectors does give a hoot about that stuff, and are interested in metadata about the song they just heard (the who, thr when, the instruments / genres / moods, lyrics). For this audience, there are few decent, clean metadata sources. And when you ask, people will point you to MusicBrainz or tools that use it as a source (like Picard or Beets). But you hadn't to fight tooth and nail to avoid tagging a 70s album "year=2005" because there happened to be a remaster that year.
    As for social features, nobody is ever going to use MusicBrainz. They might have used RYM or Last.FM before the site owners made them unusable or pointless.
  2. stuartmemo · 1790768976 · focus · HN ↗
    I made Raygum to (hopefully) simplify what you're describing - <a href="https://raygum.com" rel="nofollow">https://raygum.com
    Please email me (<username>@gmail.com) with any feedback or to rant about music apps in general!
    raffraffraff · 1790885490 · focus · HN ↗
    I will! Actually I started a personal project for this stuff, and have a dirt simple local app with about 50k tracks (YouTube embed, track credits, genre, RYM rating).
    I was going to add Spotify metadata from that recent data dump, but it's kinda trash data (valence isn't trustworthy, wildly wrong a lot of the time).
    I then stumbled on lrclib data dump, local LLM and a super two steep prompt that extracts extremely high quality lyric based metadata about the narrator, protagonist, setting, story arc, moods etc)
    Anyway, even though I bitched about MusicBrainz in another comment, their JSON dumps can be coaxed into giving the sort of metadata that I wanted to get from RYM (except that they absolutely suck)
5. wyclif · 1790770745 · focus · HN ↗
  A bigger question is why Last.fm did this, and why they don't do it again now that they're independent. I've been on Last.fm. since 2005 at least.
  1. dewey · 1790771451 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not a Last.fm issue, that's a general trend that affects everything.
    People don't blog on their personal sites any more, blog comments don't really exist any more, MySpace / Tumblr like sites are not popular any more and people don't share everything private on social media any more as everyone realized that the internet is not always a friendly place and there's enough public cases where this fired back.
6. fragmede · 1790770826 · focus · HN ↗
  Resident Advisor. Spotify also tells me when a band's in town.
7. giancarlostoro · 1790780840 · focus · HN ↗
  Your comment made me wonder if there could have been a world where MySpace would have acquired Last.fm and dove deeper into the music angle. MySpace had a niche thing with music that Facebook in my eyes never achieved. I hated Facebook when it launched, MySpace in my eyes was superior, I could connect with some of my favorite artists, though I rarely directly messaged them, except one time...
  Fun personal story about MySpace:
  One of my favorite rappers at the time Temperamento (Puerto Rican rapper) was going to do a song with a rapper from Puerto Rico (MC Ceja - his eyebrows are distinct) I had songs from in my first Cassette tape I ever had. They had some weird falling out, because my favorite rapper lived in the states most of his life, and the rapper from Puerto Rico did not like that he wanted to do a Mixtape, which was very hot at the time here.
  Anyway, he announces he's not going to like it, but he might drop a diss to the other rapper, I was excited, but bittersweet, but I gave him all my support, I mentioned his older disses, he had stopped dissing people for like a year or two to make regular music. I noted one of my favorite disses he ever did, named the rapper, and the song track.
  The next day, the diss drops. "My fans want me to do to you what I did to x" and the track playing was from the same diss I mentioned.
  Years later, I messaged him on Instagram, he still remembered my message.
  Things you can't get out of Facebook or Last.fm that MySpace could.
  Wild world.
  1. pwdisswordfishs · 1790787920 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeesh. What a bunch of babies.
    (These people are supposed to be cool?)
    giancarlostoro · 1790790205 · focus · HN ↗
    No idea, but people in that scene get killed, there's a lot of connections between some reggaeton artists and local drug lords, including being funded by them and protected by them. By insulting every rapper you can lash out against, chances are high, you will anger some very dangerous people, think of like angering a cartel boss' favorite celebrity that he built up and funds.
8. thebrain · 1790783507 · focus · HN ↗
  Connecting through music has been a part of every relationship throughout my life.
  I actually connected with people through last.fm in real life. I remember the site telling me that I had a lot in common with someone so I sent a message since we lived in the same city. After lots of chatting through the site we eventually met and dated for a bit.
leokennis · 1790754774 · focus · HN ↗
Besides the useful product, also a very lovely site.
Page size around 85 KB, bullshit around 0 BS, loaded in 140 ms on my end.
1. lelandfe · 1790792153 · focus · HN ↗
  Lovely - not my typical reaction to a 500px wide gray monospaced site, but I suppose it is lovely that it isn't a 5MB creature like we expect nowadays.
  > Page size around 85 KB
  If they compressed their favico the site would be closer to 5KB!
marcy_74 · 1790765712 · focus · HN ↗
Yes! Been wanting something like this for my personal dashboard. So much easier than hitting their full API just for scrobbles.
captn3m0 · 1790769495 · focus · HN ↗
Is the code public? I'd like to port this to <a href="https://rss-bridge.org/" rel="nofollow">https://rss-bridge.org/
dewey · 1790769551 · focus · HN ↗
For those now following the Last.fm so closely, in May of this year they became independent again (<a href="https://support.last.fm/t/last-fm-is-now-independent/118591" rel="nofollow">https://support.last.fm/t/last-fm-is-now-independent/118591) after being owned by CBS for a very long time, which is very exciting and I'm glad it wasn't just shut down by CBS.

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