Originally written on 29/6/2025.

It restricts what you can listen to your music on

You’re confined to listening to your music library on devices that support scrobbling (one way or another). By and large, this isn’t a huge issue on modern hardware but if I want to use my beloved MP3 player or even my Playstation Vita to listen to stuff then no scrobbling for me!

Moreover, it restricts the software you can use to listen to your music. Your music player of choice might have no scrobbling feature OR the scrobbling feature might be broken, and that’s that.

Scrobble “anxiety”

Anxiety is a very heavy word but what I’m talking about is the occasional nagging at the back of your mind if your music player is scrobbling properly. I cannot count how many times I’ve had decently long music listening sessions only to be disappointed that nothing from that scrobbled.

Now that I think about it, this is probably the thing that got me off LastFM. I’m listening to music to listen to music, not to curate my music stats!

Community stats

You’re confined to tagging your music generally with the most popular release/version of an album if you want community stats for that album. Otherwise, if you’ve tagged a decently well known album with an obscure release of it, you’re getting no community stats at all!

Song artists in a compilation/soundtrack album

If I scrobble an album where each song is by a different artist (like a compilation album or soundtrack), then I’ve found that generally each artist is scrobbled to a different album! This is why I have 23 versions of the Gran Turismo 5 soundtrack in my LastFM library! If you don’t want this to happen, you have to tag every song of a compilation/soundtrack with the same artist!

No value gained

I don’t think I’ve ever gained any useful insights from my music stats (other than curiosity) nor have I ever used LastFM for music discovery. All of the music I’ve discovered has been through other means.

Conclusion

I should say that I don’t dislike LastFM or anything. I think if you use streaming services for your music primarily, it’s going to be a better experience. And half of the jank I’m facing here is probably because a lot of my music was tagged rather inconsistently.

But ultimately for me, listening to music with LastFM means thinking about the success of my scrobbles and if my scrobbles are scrobbling to the right album. All the while, I get nothing in return. Well, other than satiating my curiosity about my music stats, that is. But that’s not worth it to me any more.