Allow me to spread the word about ListenBrainz , the occasion being that ListenBrainz is about to hit 100.000 users.
ListenBrainz is a FOSS project that aims to crowdsource listening data and release it under an open license. Basically it’s Last.fm but better. Whatever you use to listen to music, you can probably link it up with ListenBrainz. For instance you can connect Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Last.fm . You can link it up with loads of music players . If you’ve kept track of your what music you’ve listened to up to this point, don’t worry, there are several ways to import them into ListenBrainz.
All ListenBrainz listening data is available for all to use. This means that we don’t need to rely on big companies like Spotify for recommendation algorithms. We can use whatever algorithm suits us best. All sorts of other services could be build to make use of the ListenBrainz data set. The dataset can also help analyze other services’ algorithms, for instance the Fair MusE project uses LB-data and LB-users to investigate the fairness of different music service algorithms.
Obviously ListenBrainz initially suffered from being a comparatively small service, For good recommendations you need loads of data. But it’s growing every day and I feel like the 1 billion listens is an impressive milestone. And ListenBrainz has the advantage of having listening data from several services, Spotify could never recommend you music that’s not on Spotify. ListenBrainz, because it’s open, doesn’t have such inherent blindspots.
I am not working for ListenBrainz in any way, I just really like this project as well as MusicBrainz , and I like to spread the word. I think the aims of the ListenBrainz probably align with some Fediverse-folks. If you don’t care about the service itself, you could still link up to support FOSS music services, not only LB itself, but other services that are, can and will be built using LB’s data. If you use another service to store your own listening data, for instance Last.fm, you could use ListenBrainz as a backup for you data in case the other sevice ever enshittifies. Note: you shouldn’t sign up if you want your listening data to be private, that’s not what LB is for. I care very much about privacy, but in the case of LB I consciously choose to share my music listening data with others for my own benefit.
Curious to hear peoples thought on all this.
P.S. I have posted about LB over a year ago. I don’t intend to spam this service, but i feel like it could be useful for folks on here, and I think most of you folks would support the spreading of FOSS. And LBs usercount rising from 36k january last year to 100k now seemed like a good celebratory occasion to spread the love once more.
I wonder what caused the sharp user increase from April and after
Yes me too. I have no idea.
How do they handle fake data submissions? Ignore and let consumers figure that out?
Whatever you use to listen to music
Winamp gang! (sadly not supported)
But I don’t want my listening history publicly accessible (I was an avid Last.fm user in the '10s, but always kept my profile private), so I would skip this one anyway. Love MusicBrainz though.
Looks interesting, any suggestions about how to get started? Is there a mobile app I can use to play songs?
ListenBrainz is used to track your music listening habits. So you just use whatever application you are using now, and submit the listening data to LB. This page should help you find if what you’re using now to play music is compatible with LB somehow. If you’re on Android I think you can use the ListenBrainz official app, but personally I have no experience with it, since I only listen to music on laptop/
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Thanks for the tip, will check it out. The only things that bugs me it that there source code is only on Microsoft Github service, just self-host forgejo like sane FOSS projects do
Been an LB user for more than 2 years now, and it’s been my nerd snipping since then. The metadata is a joy to work with, and it’s quite easy to script things.
It does have that “brand new app” smell to it, but that means you get to experience seeing a long awaited feature finally getting done.
I already use MusicBrainz Picard to scan and sort my music files.
So what happens to the data? As far as I can see you’re uploading your music listens to the service and you don’t have a private profile, it’s always public and everything is being provided as a download for everybody. So everybody can get the full amount of my listening history, including Metadata telling them for example when I was awake, listened to sad songs or drinking songs on a thursday night?
Yes, there is not a feature for private profiles. If your listening data is a privacy concern to you it’s better not to use LB.
Whatever floats your boat, but I think algorithmic music recommendations are utterly useless. If I want to broaden my musical horizon, I absolutely want chance to be an element in that. Be it radio music, film music, some kind of background music in a restaurant or while shopping - whatever. I don’t need a stinking algorithm for everything :p
What has worked nice for me is to listen to the AccuRadio channel of the genre I’m in the mood for, and rate the songs. Then later when I have the time, I look at my ratings history page and download the ones I rated high from youtube in mp3, so I can have my own local “radio stations” of the songs I enjoy. Then months later, when/if I got bored of them, I can go back to AccuRadio and see what new songs they added in the meantime.
I just occasionally load up a whole folder of my mp3 collection and shuffle :D
This is pretty much the step I need to get back to listening to my own music rather than streaming. Can it plugin to ‘offline’ apps?
Depends. LB supports traditional Lastfm scrobling, so you can use players that scrobbles to Lastfm if you can change the URL
The in-app player is more limited, but a good old Navidrome instance is plenty enough!
apparently it has navidrome support :) navidrome enables you to have your own music library on a device from that you then stream it on your other devices
Can confirm this works with Navidrome. I also have Navidrome updating last.fm as well.
The other way around, and yes.
https://kawaiidango.github.io/pano-scrobbler/ is one example, but most decent Desktop/Mobile applications have some sort of plugin.
Depends on the app.
If it caches the plays and syncs it back to the scrobble service?
Probably possible.
Afaik it’s not possible for Jellyfin.There was a time I used Plex with PlexAmp for music, pretty sure it kept stats
Can someone explain to a Gen x guy what “listening data” gets me? I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years. Does this use my music? Does this get it from the Internet somewhere? How is it different from asking Alexa to play music for me? Thanks.
It depends on your preferences, but myself I just like knowing what I listen to a lot and send my monthly cover art collage to brag about my blorbos
The player / radio are nice, but I personally created my own radio generator based on my data
I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years.
Same here. I love that shit. My mood is the algorithm. I still occasionally get new stuff, but from other sources I happen to see or hear, like a Netflix show that has it in the background or a musician’s personal recommendation in an interview, and I go look it up manually. But even if I never got anything new, I already have more music than I could easily listen to in a lifetime that I already know I liked at least once.
I’ve tried streaming sources, but it never hits right. This way, where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right, always fresh, and I’m always listening to something I want to hear.
I’ve been using LastFM for nearly two decades now. First of all, having personal listening statistics is kind of fun. It might be not for everybody, but it’s nice to see which albums are your most played over a year or what you listened to back in 2015, how your favorite artists changed, which album really vibed with you and so on.
Second, you can get really good recommendations for new music when you have a larger user base and are running into a smaller genres. So just like Amazon’s and people who bought this product also bought that product for music. So people who listen to Britney Spiels also like to listen to Christina Aguilera. That might be obvious for you, but it’s totally interesting if you go down some of these genres and if you want to explore them.
And on a broader scale, listening data is quite valuable to create a good music service. So if somebody never heard of a band called Deep Purple and wants to change that, there might be this one song everybody knows from Deep Purple. And this is, of course, the most popular, but how do you find out that this is the most popular? So if you have your own Jellyfin installation, you load in several albums of Deep Purple, but you need some data source to tell you that ‘smoke on the water’ is that famous song from Deep Purple that everybody’s listening to.
I love listening stats, I just don’t need to share them, and for that I have Navidrome. I use subsonic clients and a Navidrome server for my Bandcamp purchased. I get the stats and privacy too…
I have been using Last.fm for almost 20 years. Still using it because I already know it well and it works.
I hadn’t done my homework yet on ListenBrainz, despite using Picard for a couple years now.
Welp, your words convinced me that I should make the switch. Thank you for your post!
Such a great service.
Both it and musicbrainz.Hear hear! I love me the brainz projects. Their player is a bit buggy still but so so good to avoid being locked in
