from Hacker News

Analyzing Last.fm Listening History

by cobralibre on 6/14/16, 12:57 PM with 26 comments

• by jc4p on 6/14/16, 4:50 PM

  This is really cool! I love playing with my own Last.fm data. Some suggestions:

  - Manually (or using your Facebook timeline?) place out big events in your life and see if you can see what kind of music you listened to before/after them that you don't normally. I listen to depressing shit post break-ups.

  - Use your Twitter or any other feed to estimate your "mood" over time and see if you can find any music you listened to while you're angry

  - Use The Echo Nest to get metrics for how happy/sad/energetic the music you listen to is.

  - Come up with your own definition of albums played! I hate Last.fm's because, as you mentioned, it heavily biases albums with multiple tracks. In my personal analysis I always start off with a RLE for tracks played on the same album, and my metric for "albums I listen to the most" is "which albums do I listen to at least 3 continuous songs from the most".

  I spent a few months this year trying to combine my Last.fm listening history with my geolocation history (I've mostly just stayed in the same place for the last 8 years, 3-4 years) and Forecast.io's historical API to be able to answer the question "am I really only happy when it rains?" -- Data warehousing is a hard problem, though.

• by maaaats on 6/14/16, 2:31 PM

  263,428 plays over 53,632 songs = 5 plays of each song on average. (updated after comment below)

  I haven't "scrobbled" in many years, but checked now that I in 2007 (when I was 16) had 12,377 plays with only 153 unique songs. An average of playing each song 78 times. However, most of the songs I only listened to a few times, so there is basically just ~20+ songs I listened to 250-500 times each that year.

  So I guess I was a typical teenager that got obsessed with some songs/artists and listened to them non stop, heh.

• by morsch on 6/14/16, 11:04 PM

  Shameless plug of a weekend project from a while back (I'm pleasently surprised it still works): http://deja-entendu.zomg.zone

  Auto-creates a Spotify playlist from your scrobbles from 6 months, or a year ago or whenever. For instance, if you want to walk a mile in the article author's shoes (ears?): http://deja-entendu.zomg.zone/gboeing

• by rahoulb on 6/14/16, 2:54 PM

  It's kind of stupid, but when I tried out Apple Music, the lack of Last.fm integration really bugged me and I soon switched back to Spotify. Now I understand why :-D

• by gboeing on 6/14/16, 4:58 PM

  Original author here. Thanks everyone for the comments! If you've got any other feedback or suggestions I am more than happy to hear it!

• by pgm8705 on 6/14/16, 1:49 PM

  Very cool. I've always wanted to do something like this as well. I'd be interested in analyzing my listening habits throughout the year to see if there is any correlation between months and artists. I feel like I'm pretty "seasonal" with what I listen to.

• by sotojuan on 6/14/16, 2:16 PM

  Pretty cool, still sad at the really bad Last.fm redesign but glad useful things come out of the data.

• by askmike on 6/14/16, 2:37 PM

  It's pretty awesome what you can do with that dataset. I made a visualization a few years back for a class that looks at the genres I listened to over time:

  http://lab.askmike.org/d3/songstream/

• by pbuzbee on 6/14/16, 8:29 PM

  I made something similar with my own data recently. With ~330k plays and 11 years of data, I really enjoyed seeing the long-term changes and trends in my music habits.

  I could see where my tastes would change based on where I was in my life (high school, college, entering a relationship, etc). These transitions marked huge changes in my tastes.

  It was also cool to see other trends. For example, I found that I have a "concert bounce" where I listen to an artist much more after seeing them live.

• by whatever_dude on 6/14/16, 6:39 PM

  This just me realize I haven't been using last.fm for a couple of years, after obsessing on having it in everything I used to listen to music. I guess my move to Pandora didn't help.

  But what do I know, there's a browser extension that does that! http://build.last.fm/item/1000591

  Back to last.fm I go.

• by iopq on 6/14/16, 2:11 PM

  If you look at my listening history, Untitled is by far my favorite track. That's because every interlude on one album is untitled so I end up listening to it like 5 times every time I listen to the album. Never mind the track number, though, it doesn't look at it.

• by h2hn on 6/14/16, 2:27 PM

  Cool I have a great collection in lastfm also. So I should check it out...