Last FM is a music service which tracks the music you listens to and allows you to comment on and post about the music you are interested in and love or hate, or simply that you enjoy. It also sends you recommendations about other artists or tracks you might like. It is a slightly weird service beloved of people who have an obsession with tracking things about themselves, in a similar vein to fitness trackers, train spotters, restaurant reviewers, blogs, book trackers and the vast panoply of other things which people like to keep a record of.
I have used Last FM for a long time (around 8 years) and it's been something I've loved as I've always had a fondness for tracking my music listening, carrying it around like a badge of honour. One of the main reasons I despise Apple so much is that they made porting your music library between devices so fucking difficult in the early noughties, which meant that my listening records (which would probably now be a mark of shame) from my late teens into my early thirties were lost forever, stuck on a progression of fucked Ipods and laptops with built-in obsolescence. Last FM has soldiered on over the years despite the fact it doesn't seem to advertise anywhere. It used to be the top search result on Google back in the days before Google became an advertising free-for-all.
The Last FM service still seems to meander along (owned by the benevolent society of ViacomCBS) and I check it all the time to see what I've been listening to and what the other people I know who actually use it are also listening to. It's like the service which figured out the social side of music in a similar way Soundcloud has but in the way in which Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music definitively have not. I don't really understand why the music streaming giants are so averse to setting up a functioning social media side to their music platforms other than Soundcloud. It doesn't really add up but maybe it's a function of Spotify particularly's desire to retain a "pure" music platform (while still harvesting all the data from their customers). The closest that Spotify gets to social media is the list of music which the people who I somehow got paired with all those years ago when I had a Facebook account have most recently listened to. This isn't really a fair reflection of someone's music tastes as you're only seeing a snapshot of the last thing they listened to and that's only when you're using the shonky Spotify desktop application, which is an awful thing to use.
Why do the big music streaming services not offer this social aspect? With the exception of Soundcloud, which is a very different service none of them really do. Apple and Spotify allow you to "like" tracks and to maintain playlists of music on their service which are not shareable outside their service and Apple have allowed you to (kind of) blend your personal collection of MP3s / digital music with their own service which puts them streets ahead of Spotify and their shitty attempt at doing this through their aforementioned piss poor desktop app. However this is very individualized, it's about your experience with the platform as an individual unless you count the shared playlists, and therefore there is very little potential for you to be able to really interact with other people you know on their platform.
Based on the Shohsana Zuboff analysis of social media It seems to be a given that technology companies are desperate for you to engage with them so as to allow them to surreptitiously harvest more data about your day-to-day activities. Engagement and clicks are the keys to unicorn status. However, the music streamers and in fact the video streamers as well, do not seem to follow this business model. I don't know anyone who would admit to spending more than the bare minimum of time on any of the music streaming services unattractive front-end interfaces. They are awful.
But what if they're not interested in your interaction a la classic social media like FB, Twitter or Instagram because what they want to do is sit in the background listening, harvesting and tracking you while you do whatever it is you do to a soundtrack? What if their sole purpose is to find out what you're listening to and when and where and to use that data to build a listening profile and understanding of music taste which would allow them to front-run any trend with their own brand of weird anonymous music? We've all experienced the "Discovery" Spotify playlist which continually suggests unknown artists with hundreds of thousands of plays on Spotify but little to no footprint outside the platform. Martin Landh was the one who kept popping up for me, he's written the music for lots of adverts. You can still contact him via Hotmail despite his 157,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. I guess he's not making too much from that gig.
For the music streamers and likely the video-streamers too, transparent user interaction between each other where people can comment and criticise music is unwelcome as it introduces a wild-card of non-controllable preferences into the algorithims they are building which will inevitably (and this is something which Zuboff touches on) move from tracking preferences, to creating them.
We've recreated record labels, except now they're technology companies pretending to be music streaming services run by data analysts who don't have any link to the music beyond recommendations and analysis generated by a massive database and algorithmic insight into the listening habits of the worlds Spotify and Apple Music users.
Maybe Last FM had something there but if it's owned by ViacomCBS I doubt they'll ever have the insight or vision to make something of it. Oh and if you want to see what I'm listening, a topic of very little interest to anyone other than me, you can find we me here.
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