Last.fm Turns Twenty ⇥ twitter.com
It’s our 20th birthday today . A huge thank you to everyone who supported us and scrobbled with us throughout that time. You make http://Last.fm possible. Bring on the next 20.
Via Jacob Kastrenakes at the Verge:
I was a little surprised to see that Last.fm was still around when I first started writing this story, let alone that it had new communities flourishing around its data. (The company didn’t respond to a request for an interview.) But I suppose in a world where most services close off and hide your data, there’ll always be people looking for a way to track it and analyze it themselves. And in exchange, they get the joy of arguing about music stats every day — and not just once a year when Wrapped comes out.
It is not just about the stats and the tracking — it is about what those things can do. When I re-activated my Last.fm scrobbling last spring, my goal was to pair Apple Music’s massive library with Last.fm’s more compelling listening suggestions. Keeping those things separate also makes it more portable. If I ever decide to switch to Spotify or drop my Apple Music subscription and rely only on local files again, my history and recommendations will be preserved elsewhere.