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?)
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?)
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.