Are you into music discovery? Do you use social music sites or apps in order to communicate with other people that are like-minded when it comes to the genres, artists and songs they enjoy? One thing is for sure, music streaming services and online internet radio sites have made it quite a bit easier to find and recommend artists to us that are similar to whatever we choose to like, give a thumbs up to or add to our personal library. That system may be enough for some people to be satisfied but there is something else you can do that will allow you to gather play data from multiple music services and over a long period of time. That data, basically musical analytics, can then be broken down into reports of all sorts and into different periods of your listening time. The photo above was taken from part of my last week's listening report and shows just a very few of the different stats available.
Here is another page of reports:
The service that makes all of this possible is the website http://Last.fm. Once you acquire your own account on the site, you can then use your Last.fm username and password to connect it with many different music services you already use. For instance, in your setting for Spotify, there is a place to enter your Last.fm credentials. Once that is done and a song is played, every bit of info on each song will be uploaded to your Last.fm online profile. You can imagine the data one can gather if they utilize Last.fm to scrobble tracks from multiple music sources. Some services aren't officially supported by Last.fm, but their are almost always third party apps that will make it possible on just about everything.
Here's one last example of reporting available:
In addition to the statistics that Last.fm provides, it is also a social community full of other music fanatics all with tons of play history to compare and share with one another in order to find exactly the type of sound you're looking for. Yet another thing that the service allows you to do is to connect your Spotify premium or Youtube account so that it can also be used as a streamer itself...both for newly found content as well as what you have accumulated in your music library over time. While are listening to music through the Last.fm app or website, it will recommend a new song for you to play next if you want and tell you what artists and songs it is similar to that you have already listened to. The main profile page is broken into four sections - an overview of recently played and anything currently scrobbling, your all time scrobbles by artist, by album and then by track.
Here is my all time number of scrobbles by track:
My all time scrobbles by album:
My all time number by artist:
There is also a tab for you to look at the overall music charts by genre etc that consists of data from all Last.fm users. In the music discovery section, you can find links and info about all of your top recommended albums, artists and songs as shown below:
Finally, here is a screenshot of a page that tells several of the officially supported music services and how to link your Last.fm profile with them in order to integrate the two services together. I am quite willing to spend money on more streamers than the average person because they all have certain capabilities that are unique...I enjoy having access to as many as possible so I currently use Spotify premium, Youtube Music Red, Google Play Music, Tidal, Pandora Plus, Soundcloud Go+ and Amazon Music Unlimited - as well as some online radio station apps like Slacker Premium and iHeart Radio. I hope you find some of this information about Last.fm useful. Good luck looking for great tunes and here is the page showing some officially supported music services: