I dunno, but I think I’m done with Last.fm. It was neat, I guess, but after five years, I’ve determined that it’s just not useful to my life.
Essentially, supported music players could be connected to your Last.fm profile and every song play is tracked (it’s called “scrobbling”). Ostensibly, it was a way to discover new artists or find music that you’d be interested in. And, on occasion, when you visited your profile, they might offer some free downloads of music that might interest you. All statistics, really. They then bolted on this social aspect to it so you could compare your tastes to those of your “friends” and make new “friends” out of strangers. I guess that’s useful if you live in a society where your identity is tied to what media you consumed (like the one I grew up in). But I don’t live in that society anymore.
I guess my musical enjoyment has waned in the past five years I’ve been using the service (since June 13, 2009). I mean, they’ve tracked 40452 of my song plays on all my linked media players (Winamp, Banshee, Rhythmbox, Amarok, etc.). So I’ve listened to a lot of music, but on every playback there’s this background paranoia that my activities are being logged and put on display to anybody who visits my profile. That paranoia existed in the noise floor of my life, always below the squelch level since I had this feeling that the service was a Good Thing. But my feeling now it that it’s not exactly all that great or useful, so the squelch level has been adjusted lower to be more sensitive, and that nagging in the gut is sharper than ever.
These statistics are serving Last.fm (and their parent corporation CBS Interactive) more than they’re serving me. I guess that’s what burns me a little. A look at my own data tells me a few things, but nothing I didn’t much already know. And it certainly doesn’t accurately predict who my favorite artists are – it just predicts whose songs I play the most (aye, there’s the rub – if an artist produces long albums with short songs, Last.fm thinks you are absolutely in love with that band, because look at all the songs you played!). So, according to Last.fm, my top artists are as follows:
| Rank | Artist | Plays |
| 1 | Nine Inch Nails | 865 |
| 2 | Shpongle | 846 |
| 3 | Depeche Mode | 829 |
| 4 | Stellardrone | 784 |
| 5 | VNV Nation | 629 |
| 6 | Skinny Puppy | 626 |
| 7 | Gary Numan | 573 |
| 8 | mind.in.a.box | 504 |
| 9 | The Orb | 497 |
| 10 | The Future Sound of London | 487 |
| 11 | U2 | 476 |
| 12 | The Cure | 459 |
| 13 | Rush | 457 |
| 14 | The Knife | 445 |
| 15 | Type O Negative | 403 |
Sure, quite a few of these bands are my all-time favorites, I’ll grant that. But Stellardrone, for instance, was a recent addition only because I grabbed the artist’s discography and used it judiciously to mask background noise while trying so sleep for my graveyard shifts (a recent concern in the past year). The problem is that this data doesn’t reflect my entire history of listening to music since I got my first Walkman in high school – I love so much more than these top bands (where is Pink Floyd, Yes, or Sarah McLachlan, for instance?). This data reflects only my logged plays on connected devices since 2009. Any passing fascinations with such-and-such a band during that time artificially carries stronger weight than it naturally would have carried in the grand scheme of things. Statistics are funny like that.
I uninstalled the Last.fm scrobbler plugin from my laptop’s Winamp over 2 years ago – that was kinda the beginning of the end (really, it was just another piece of software stealing precious processor cycles from my low-powered laptop). I’ve also stopped linking any new software to my profile, just letting the old ones fade out due to upgrades and attrition so that only the Banshee software on my Linux desktop is reporting my song plays. But after recently becoming acquainted with the Plex Media Center, where I’ve been going through my collection at random as the mood fits, I noticed something was missing: the paranoia. Nobody’s watching! (*That I know of, but since Plex is a network-based service linked to a single-sign-on at the plex.tv site, even though the media is hosted at my own house, they could very well be tracking plays on the back end). The scrobbler is still installed on Banshee, and may stay installed for a long while, but I have disabled scrobbling.
So yeah, I’m kinda done. There is so much in my music collection that I adore, so much that I’ve loved in the past, so much that I want to listen to more of, but the thought that I’m being watched (voluntarily, mind you) kinda puts a wet towel on that fire. I want to enjoy my music again without looking over my shoulder. I volunteered all that data, and now I’m voluntarily opting out. The payout just hasn’t been worth it.