Spotify + Last.fm: Personalise your music recommendations
As good as Spotify is, it is beaten hands-down when it comes to music recommendations by Last.fm. Spotify’s “Radio” function is worthless, and its “Artists you may like” section is very small beer. What we need to do is combine Spotify and Last.fm.
Last.fm recommends music based on what you listen to, and generates playlists or stations. It’s possible that Spotify and Last.fm could officially join forces, enabling Spotify to offer personalised playlists and recommended albums, and flag up relevant new additions to the catalogue. Until then, we need to combine the two services manually. This is how to do it:
The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t done so already, is to sign up to Last.fm – you can do that here. With all the recent hype surrounding Spotify, it’s easy to forget just how good Last.fm is. It’s essentially a personal radio station that builds playlists based on your listening habits. It does this by ‘scrobbling’, or identifying and tracking, each piece of music you listen to. Signing up is easy – just enter a user name, email address and password, and you’re away. And, of course, it’s free.
If you’d like Last.fm to scrobble the music you listen to on your computer or iPod you can download the Last.fm Scrobbler. The more tracks you scrobble, the better recommendations you’re going to get. (I’m currently at 24,685…)
To scrobble your Spotify listening habits, open Spotify, go to Edit and Preferences, tick ‘Enable scrobbling to Last.fm’ and enter your Last.fm username and password. If you’re new to Last.fm it’s going to take a few weeks to build up enough scrobbles to take full advantage of the service. So fire up Spotify and get listening…
Once you’ve built up a useful Last.fm profile, you can use this information to search the Spotify catalogue. There are a number of tools that can root through your Last.fm profile to pick out recommended listens on Spotify. Among the best are Spotify.fm and Last.fm + Spotify. Just enter your Last.fm username and these tools will generate lists of recent releases for your favourite and recommended artists. (Note that currently these lists may be slightly out of date due to a temporary problem with Spotify’s new catalogue additions notifications.)
It’s well worth taking the time to set up and build a Last.fm profile. Combining Spotify and Last.fm can really enhance your listening pleasure.
There’s a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that places Spotify links next to all artists and tracks in Last.fm when you are browsing. Can be a useful link between the two.
Nice post!
Another option – if you don’t want to register on Last.fm and scrobble – is to use a Spotify+Last.fm mashup to give you a set of track recommendations to be added to Spotify (based on an artist you like).
My own service Spotiseek.com is such an example (as well as Spotibot).
Btw: I guess each option is suitable for different kinds of needs; maybe Spotiseek/Spotibot when wanting a larger set of new music at once, and Last.fm when just browsing through their lists and playing a few tracks at a time (?).
Both services spotify.fm and last.fm +spotify that are mentioned in the article are no longer available. Are there any new sites/services that can do the same? Would really love to combine both services without manually entering artists names.