Last.FM Scrobbling & Title Issues

I wish I knew what Last.FM really was when I first joined in 2016. Before Last.FM was just a radio station and back then I didn’t have a good cellular plan to scrobble when I’m on the go without driving up my monthly plan fee which was the cheapest at the time as I can’t afford a higher plan. Eventually I can afford a better cellular plan.

Around 2019, I came back to Last.FM when I was looking through Google related to the artist of a track I was listening to and saw the profile. Then I had a browse around the site and notice there is even more artist had the same treatment.

Then I downloaded a 3rd party app called Pano Scrobbler and started scrobbling as the original app barely works for me (even with the new UI update) and also I got used Pano’s simplistic UI and also correct track artist and title before being scrobbled to Last.FM. I know recently Last.FM offered this autocorrection feature.

Even though services like Spotify, Deezer, Pandora Radio, Tidal (discontinued?), and Slacker offers native support for scrobbling, I still prefer Pano Scrobbler as there is no disconnects and supports other steam apps that aren’t official integrated in the likes of Apple Music or YouTube Music.

Scrobbling on iPhone is pretty hard as there is no “listening to notification” type thing like Android does as you have to scan for scrobbles according to the Reddit post.

Web Scrobbling

As for web scrobbling, I use an extension called Web Scrobbler, which supports over 30+ websites and works on most modern browsers. The only downside is you will have to manually edit while scrobbling multiple artists from a single track. With Last.FM auto correct feature, I don’t have to worry about that as this is cross platform as well.

Sometimes Deezer or Spotify or any other platform geo-block a track and made unavailable for listening or scrobbling. This is where Open Scrobbler comes very handy as it allows you to manually enter the metadata and scrobble.

Metadata Issues

One of the problem with Last.FM is that suffers from title inconsistency as different platform outputs them differently. For example Love Tonight (Robin Schulz Remix) by Shouse would be displayed as Love Tonight (Robin Schulz Remix) on Deezer, YouTube Music and Spotify would be Love Tonight – Robin Schulz Remix with a dash instead of brackets while Apple Music follows Deezer styled output with a – Single towards the end. This causes wrong stats displayed on Last.FM as we have few different versions and also accumulates the database with unnecessary versions.

Same goes for multiple artist. Deezer and Spotify mostly outputs the same. Apple Music often separate artist with ampersand (before 2021?) and now uses the word and.

  • Deezer: What Would You Do?
    Joel Corry, David Guetta, Bryson Tiller
  • Spotify: What Would You Do?
    Joel Corry • David Guetta • Bryson Tiller
  • Apple Music: What Would You Do? – Single
    Joel Corry, David Guetta and Bryson Tiller
  • YouTube Music: What Would You Do?
    Joel Corry, David Guetta & Bryson Tiller

Newly released track on Deezer don’t have correct metadata on their end as featured artist don’t always shows up until few month later. YouTube Music sometimes output the artists in different order.

One biggest problem with Last.FM is that artist/s with the same name being married into one profile and certain artist gets redirected because of similar titles.

I think that Last.FM should have their own database of metadata to scrobble from or sourcing the information from a 3rd party.