How to use Last.fm to find better music
July 16, 2026 · 6 min read
Your taste is currently scattered across platforms, and none of them own the whole picture. Spotify knows your commute. Apple Music knows the year you switched. The CDs and the vinyl know things neither of them will ever hear about. Last.fm is the one tool quietly trying to keep the whole record.
What Last.fm actually is
Last.fm isn't a streaming service and doesn't want to be. It does one strange, useful thing: it scrobbles. Every time you play a track — on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, a desktop player, sometimes even a turntable with the right setup — it logs it. Artist, track, timestamp. Forever.
The result is a diary of what you actually played. Not what you starred, not the playlist you made to seem interesting — the real, slightly embarrassing log of the songs you reached for at 2pm on a Wednesday.
Why that log is worth more than it looks
It's honest. Saved albums record aspiration. Play counts record behavior. When those disagree, the play count is telling the truth.
It's platform-independent. This is the big one. If you leave Spotify tomorrow, your Spotify taste profile stays behind — it's theirs, not yours. Last.fm sits above the platforms, so switching services doesn't reset your history.
It's longitudinal. Some people have fifteen years of scrobbles. No streaming service knows what you loved in 2011 and quietly abandoned in 2014. That arc is real information about who you are as a listener.
Setting it up (about five minutes)
- Make an account at last.fm. Free.
- Connect your streaming service. In Last.fm's settings, link Spotify and it scrobbles automatically from then on. Apple Music and others generally need a companion scrobbler app on your phone or desktop.
- Then forget about it. This is the important step. Scrobbling only pays off with time — it's a savings account, not a slot machine. Set it up and let it quietly accumulate for a few months.
One honest note: a brand-new account knows nothing about you. If you connect it today and expect insight tonight, you'll be disappointed. Give it real listening first.
How to actually use it
Your charts
Top artists and albums by week, month, year, all-time. Read the gaps, not the hits — you know your top artist. More interesting is who fell off, and what quietly climbed while you weren't paying attention.
Similar artists
Built from what real listeners actually play together rather than audio analysis. It's blunt, but it's grounded in human behavior — and it goes deeper into the tail than most in-app suggestions will.
Tags
Community-applied and often gloriously specific in a way official genres never are. Following a weird tag sideways is one of the better rabbit holes on the internet.
Neighbours
People whose listening overlaps yours. Their libraries are a recommendation list assembled by an actual human with a life — which is exactly the thing algorithms can't fake.
Where it falls short
Being straight with you: Last.fm is a brilliant mirror and a mediocre telescope. It records your taste beautifully. It's much weaker at pointing you at things you don't know — the similar-artist feature is old, the interface is a museum piece, and it will happily show you an artist you've played four hundred times as a "recommendation."
Which is the running theme: the data is fantastic, the discovery layer on top of it isn't.
B-Side connects to Last.fm precisely because of everything above — your scrobbles are the most honest picture of your taste that exists, and they're not locked to one platform.
We use that history to build a weekly radar of five albums you don't already know, from the edges of what you actually play. You can connect Spotify and Apple Music too — sources are additive, so more history just sharpens the picture rather than overwriting it.
Just a username. Last.fm scrobbles are public, so there's no password to hand over.
Try B-Side freeWorth doing either way
Even if you never use another tool: start scrobbling. It costs nothing, takes five minutes, and in three years you'll have something no streaming service will ever hand you — a complete, portable record of your own listening life, that you own.
The best time to have started was a decade ago. The second best time is this afternoon.