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.
“Give us more data so we can take any of the effort out of deciding what to like.” is a big miss for me.
I’ll happily take my 30 minutes of scrolling Bandcamp and YouTube at bedtime for new artists if it means that my preferences and habits are none of your fucking business.
Fair enough, personally I don’t mind using algorithms as long as they are fully transparent
Meta said at the outset that they were fully transparent.
Pass on further delegating my brain to a machine.
MetaBrainz is a non-profit dedicated to open-source and open-data. So if people don’t like the algorithms LB has integrated, they can just build their own.
About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain. If you enjoy searching for music, it would be foolish to delegate it to a machine. For me personally though it’s usefull, using an algorith here allows me to spend energy on other things that are equally stimulating for my brain. I particularly like LBs ‘fresh releases’ feature, which gives you heads up about new releases by artists that you’ve listened to.
“About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain”
Yeah, big agree on this front. We should be using technology as a tool to aid us to do the stuff we care about, rather than letting ourselves be made subordinate to the tech itself. For some people, that kind of agency means using an open source system like Listenbrainz, and for some, like the person you’re replying to, that means continuing to discover music in their own way. Both of these approaches are fine — indeed, the whole point of building tech that serves as tools is that if our experience tells us that we have a task that wouldn’t benefit from the tool, we can just leave it in the box.
Personally, I enjoy going for a combination approach — I sometimes use listenbrainz as a catalyst to help me discover new stuff beyond my experience, but once I have a few new artists I’m interested in, I then go and do some manual digging around them. I don’t need to do this manual work part of it, but it’s a key part of my enjoyment of the music discovery process — so I can somewhat relate to the person you’re replying to’s preference
I’m the exact opposite. I love services recommending new artists and songs I would have never stumbled into on my own
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
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.
I wonder what caused the sharp user increase from April and after
Yes me too. I have no idea.
Looks interesting, any suggestions about how to get started? Is there a mobile app I can use to play songs?
EDIT: There is a mobile app that automatically tracks what music you’re playing (Link), it works quite well.
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/
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!
Used Last.fm for like 3 months before finding out about ListenBrainz and making the switch. Truly amazing app, love all of their services (Picard my goat) and I’m happy to hear more people are joining!
I wish the social aspect was a bit more active though, I always follow people with similar taste but I never get a follow back (and the accounts always have 0 people they follow). Also I never see pinned songs and such :(
Yeah, it’s pretty low on the social side of things. However, having watched the massive progress the project has made over the last few years makes me hopeful that it’ll continue to improve. They seem to be quite smart about how they go about developing new features, which is wise for an open source project. It’s been pretty cool to watch how good their recommendation algorithm has been getting though, compared to when I first joined
I agree on the social aspect lacking a bit. But who knows, ListenBrainz got better and better over the past years, perhaps with more users there will be more demand for social functionalities aswell, and perhaps they’ll be implemented in the future. LB was very rudimentary when I signed up, it’s nice seeing it grow and improve.
Listenbrqinz seems to keep prioritizing the discovery aspect rather than the stats
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?
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
There is a Jellyfin Plugin for this. https://github.com/lyarenei/jellyfin-plugin-listenbrainz
Offline listen history playback is my issue.
I know about the plugin (lol)
(Scrobbled by Spotify and Jellyfin)
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!
Such a great service.
Both it and musicbrainz.I use Koito as a selfhosted version of this. I use the ListenBrainz plugin to send my Jellyfin listening data to Koito, which has a setting to forward that data to ListenBrainz so I can have a backup and contribute to the ListenBrainz project. It’s pretty cool!
Koito is fantastic. I’m so ready to dump Maloja but won’t yet until Koito gets an official stable build. Multi-scrobbler is a lifesaver.
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.
Hear hear! I love me the brainz projects. Their player is a bit buggy still but so so good to avoid being locked in
I’m still bummed the AcousticBrainz project folded - I developed a decent DJ algorithm off of that data and would love to take it further, but running my own Essentia analyses ups the bar considerably.
As someone who only cares about the stats and social features , i still do not see what listenbrainz has over lastfm
- Listenbrainz isn’t owned by David Ellison.
- Do I need a #2?
Do I need a #2?
Yes. People cares about features they are interested in , not who own it
People who pay attention care.
That’s the ideology that is causing the fediverse no never go mainstream. Although mastodon 8 millions registred users is impressive
You got that backward, chief. Not caring who controls these companies are keeping people glued to Meta, X, and the like.
How will you make people care. Certainly not with talking about privacy which the fediverse is not even good at it. In fact rhe best way to promote privscy is to not make it your major selling points
I’m not here to make people care.
But I do care, and lots of other people do too.
Better track matching
More stats visualizations
Cover art collages of your favourite tracks
Fresh releases of you favourite artists
And a fully open dataset
How do they handle fake data submissions? Ignore and let consumers figure that out?
I already use MusicBrainz Picard to scan and sort my music files.
