Scrobbling it all up
posted on:
In April of this year I reactivated my last.fm account after 12.5 years. Yes, twelve and a half years. I've registered my account in 2005 and last scrobbled a song in 2012. During that time I scrobbled 13,900 tracks. Since re-activing my account (and until the time of publication of this post) I already scrobbled 5,570 tracks. (Actually more, but I deleted some.)
Wow! What a difference! But that's no wonder, since I had to be on my computer listening to music for it to be scrobbled back in the day, when now I can have various apps on my phone hooked up to last.fm. So when in the past everything I listened to on my mp3 player, or discman, or CD player in my room could not be scrobbled, I can now tell the whole world what I'm listening to wherever I am. I am not really listening to more music today than I did 15 years ago. (I think.) I can just let last.fm know about it now.
But why scrobble in the first place?
Frankly, I do not know. Why, in the age of billionaire owned companies gobbling up all the data they can get their dirty little hands on about each and every one of us, we are willingly blasting out into the world what we are listening to this very second, I never knew. And yet I did it then and am doing it again now. It's fun, I guess?
What I find interesting is that very quickly after frist starting to track my music, I started to become very conscious about what I was listening to. I'm often very private in what I like, and presenting my listening habits to everyone felt like being stripped naked in public. I thought about what I would listen to, though I don't think I was very consistent with it. Still, the question of "What do people think of me when they see I'm listening to XYZ?" always lingered in the back of my head. At one point then I stopped scrobbling. I probably couldn't see the point in it any longer. All the funnier that I have started again.
What's different now is that I don't give a shit about what other people think about what I listen to. I mean, let's be honest: Who looks at it anyway? Do you look at what people listen to?
Which of course brings us back to the question of why doing it at all. "It's fun, I guess" will be my final answer to that.
I have to admit though, that I do sometimes delete scrobbles. Not out of embarassment, though. I realised that Tidal, the music streaming service I am currently using, for some reason completely beyond my comprehension puts a whole album of a favourite audio drama series of mine in a dedicated playlist - which somehow gets scrobbled as the same track over and over. So when I'm not careful about where I hit "play" that means that instead of as 40 different tracks, that album/ playlist gets tracked as 40 times 1 track. Yeah, not in my scrobble history. So of course I delete the whole wrongly scrobbled thing from my history. It would ruin my beautiful list otherwise. If (or rather when) I'm obsessing over a song, I want the right one to show up at the top of my list. It's only an audio drama anyway. I often play them to fall asleep to so I don't need them in my history anyway. I wished there was a way to automatically exclude them from being scrobbled.
Would I delete other tracks too? Maybe. Maybe not. If so it would be for my own vanity. Because as I said, I couldn't care less if you or anyone would judge me by my listening habit. That's your business.
Where I scrobble
In the years between when last.fm was new and now there have been other scrobbling services popping up. Besides last.fm I have recently signed up to ListenBrainz as well. The cool thing about the latter is that I can integrate it into my fedi account. Sharkey, the server software I'm using, allows for linking to your ListenBrainz account so that every time you listen to something it shows up in your profile. You have to look at my profile either directly, or at least from another Sharkey/ possibly Misskey server. If you're looking at my profile through e.g. Mastodon you're not going to see it.
Do you scrobble your music?
If you want, feel free to befriend/ follow me on either or both of the following services and be surprised, amused, or unfazed by my frequent obsessions and wild mix of styles of music I listen to:
- Elena.
Leave a comment in the Fediverse
or write me an e-mail: hello [-at-] theresmiling [dot] eu