Scrobbling is My New Favorite Hobby

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Back in 2012, and I don’t even remember how I went about it, I spent enormous amounts of time scrobbling my music listening habits to Last.fm. This lasted into 2014, and I am at least semi certain I started using Spotify for this. How I did before that time … I think I must’ve been using Winamp to track things I was listening to.

Yes. That’s it.

Then I eventually created a new account for my musical presence under Eyeshadow 2600 FM and scrobbled into the 30,000s, and, like with my original account, eventually stopped doing this, as well. I also don’t really have any interest in reviving the ES2600FM Last.fm account, but that’s more to do with the piss-poor online synthwave community than anything (bullying, harassment, stalking, black-listing, etc).

Now we’ll snap into 2024, like a time machine, and I’m back at it again scrobbling on Last.fm, because it’s much simpler to do now. But, I’m mostly doing this because I found this little open source project that’s like Last.fm, but more like an entire open-web social media network of your listening habits, a Wiki that documents every song ever, and even an app you can use on your PC to submit meta-data to their database.

It’s honestly pretty wild, and I only discovered it because of a side-account I made via the Fediverse on kitsunes.club. Have I mentioned that Sharkey (a misskey fork) is really cool, and I’m half considering using it as a primary and dropping the costs of hosting my own instance (I’m still not sure about this, though, because I have to have some kind of account on a Mastodon server, if only to at least have a place to link my posts here so that I can have comments)?

But anyway, the database is at MusicBrainz, and once you’ve made an account there, you can head over to ListenBrainz, and then connect all of your music-listening apps. By doing this, you can scrobble to Last.fm, and directly to ListenBrainz, where your tastes, history, listening trends and habits all become part of this little … social network of everyone’s listening habits. It’s, again, really cool.

If you’ve gotten past all of that, and you still want more, and also have a digital music collection just sitting on your PC collecting dust, you can then grab Picard, and catalogue your collection from your hard drive directly to MusicBrainz.

The best part about all of this, is that it can be mostly entirely automatic, requiring little input from the user, depending on what you use for music.

I definitely recommend anyone who regularly listens to music to give all of this a try, and also follow me on ListenBrainz! Let’s compare our musical taste!

Anything that makes it feel like it’s still 2000 to 2010 internet is a-okay in my book.