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I ate half a bag of King's Hawaiian rolls. I am looking forward to seeing my family and eating a lot more bread. But for now, there's a bunch of stuff on the internet. Most of the news this week is about what we listen to. This week's newsletter is about a service I have fond memories of, even if I haven't used it in a long time.
We have a check-in on Last.fm, an update on Neil Young, a new audio editing tool from Anchor, and an expansion of Spotify's audiobook efforts.
We are taking Thursday and Friday off this week for the holiday season. We will be together on Tuesday. Have a wonderful holiday, see you then.
The service that popularized the practice of tracking your digital listening habits is 20 years old. A running counter on the service's website shows how many times a day users are scrobbling.
It was revolutionary when it was first introduced. The site's plug-ins, which were originally created for a different service called Audioscrobbler, took note of everything you listened to, and then displayed all kinds of statistics about your listening habits It could suggest tracks and artists to you based on what other people were listening to. Andy Baio wrote in February 2003 that a system like this would be effective in discovering new artists and finding people with similar tastes.
This was a very early example of the recommendation systems that are used in music streaming services today. They use your habits to recommend new tracks to you on all of their services. Your data is not made public on those services. It was similar to having access to your year-end streaming service but always up to date.
People are fond of talking about music.
You're Wrong About, Pod Save America, and Joe Rogan are all things that people are scrobbling for. Music is more popular than podcasts.
I haven't scrobbled anything in more than a decade, and streaming services' automated recommendations have largely obviated the need for a platform like Last. There are still corners of the internet that build vibrant communities around its features. Third-party developers built a service called.fmbot to integrate scrobbling data into the popular chat room app.
According to the owner and maintainer of.fmbot, who only gave his first name, people like to talk about music. It is a way to see other people's music tastes.
The bot has more than 400,000 users and 40,000 people engaging with it each day. He says it is popular in Discords where people want to compare their statistics to each other and in server for small friend groups so they can dive deeper into what everyone is listening to.
A list of their top albums, the date when they first listened to a song, and how many days a year they consume music are just some of the fun facts the bot pulls in. He said he joined Last.fm after it was already. He sees a future for the service if it's still around. He thinks that the bot could grow even further if Discord bets bigger on it.
When I first started writing this story, I was a little surprised that Last.fm was still around. A request for an interview was not responded to by the company. In a world where most services hide your data, there will always be people looking for a way to track it. They get the joy of arguing about music statistics every day and not just once a year.
Neil Young talked about climate change, Woodstock, and, of course, yanking his music from Spotify in protest of the company's support for Joe Rogan and his spread of covid misinformation.
What is the calculation when you pull a catalog? What amount of money did you decline? Young dodged the question of how many millions of dollars. I was confident that I would do well. He was told that he wouldn't see Young back there any time soon.
Young said he would never go back there. I don't have to.
I don't think I would want to keep it on the service.
Losing Young isn't a big deal for the service, but it shows the power that major artists have. In a world where enough big names choose one service over another, young and other top musicians have the leverage and success to pick and choose. We are far from that reality for now. The decline of streaming exclusives shows that most parties prefer one platform over another.
During the interview, Young made sure to mention that most digital music is garbage due to the compression. We don't need it, we don't need it I have it all these other places. It sounds better at other places. I don't think I would want to keep it on the service.
The line is a good one. I don't agree with Young's audio quality gripes, but I would like to know when the HiFi tier will show up.
The new addition to anchor is meant to help clean up audio by making voices pop and noise fade away. There is a button in the bottom right corner of the screen that adjusts the audio with a single tap.
I didn't find the feature impressive and it makes your voice a bit louder. I was impressed with how well my phone's microphone isolated my voice, even as I blasted two clips of New York City street sounds and a lo-fi music channel less than a foot away from the mic.
What Anchor is doing is important. It will need to do everything it can to make sure these are good to listen to. The Enhance button could use some work, but it is a step in the right direction.
In the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, you can now listen to audiobooks on the platform. Making audiobooks the third pillar of the business is dependent on continued global expansion. It will improve the user experience so that people can actually buy books inside the app, but it is not clear if it will happen for Spotify.
Today, that is all. Next week, see you
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