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?
I used to love 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?)
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.
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 collections who don't give a hoot about that stuff, and are interested in metadata about the song they just heard (the who, the when, the instruments / genres / moods, lyrics). For this audience, there are few decent, clean metadata sources. But when you ask, people will point you to MusicBrainz or tools that use it as a source (like Picard or Beets). You have to fight tooth and nail to avoid tagging a 70s album year as "2005" because there happened to be a remaster that year. Who. Fucking. Cares what year a Remaster happened when it's a 1976 album that you don't want showing up in your "Best of 2005" smart playlists.
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.
I will! Actually I started a personal project for music discovery and exploration. It's currently a dirt simple local app with about 50k tracks (YouTube embed, track credits, genre, 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 step 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, who absolutely suck due to their crazy aggressive blocking, self sabotage and unforgivable data poisoning if you trigger their bot tripwire. Their data came from their users, but as a paying user you can't use their site to tag your music. No API, and you get banned if you try to write a music player plugin to fix the tags in your "now playing" track. I don't know what their business plan is, or who they think their audience is.
TFNA · · focus · HN ↗
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?
raffraffraff · · focus · HN ↗
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?)
TFNA · · focus · HN ↗
raffraffraff · · focus · HN ↗
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.
stuartmemo · · focus · HN ↗
Please email me (<username>@gmail.com) with any feedback or to rant about music apps in general!
raffraffraff · · focus · HN ↗
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 step 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, who absolutely suck due to their crazy aggressive blocking, self sabotage and unforgivable data poisoning if you trigger their bot tripwire. Their data came from their users, but as a paying user you can't use their site to tag your music. No API, and you get banned if you try to write a music player plugin to fix the tags in your "now playing" track. I don't know what their business plan is, or who they think their audience is.