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.
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.
How do they handle fake data submissions? Ignore and let consumers figure that out?
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 already use MusicBrainz Picard to scan and sort my music files.
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/
Whatever floats your boat, but I think algorithmic music recommendations are utterly useless. If I want to broaden my musical horizon, I absolutely want chance to be an element in that. Be it radio music, film music, some kind of background music in a restaurant or while shopping - whatever. I don’t need a stinking algorithm for everything :p
What has worked nice for me is to listen to the AccuRadio channel of the genre I’m in the mood for, and rate the songs. Then later when I have the time, I look at my ratings history page and download the ones I rated high from youtube in mp3, so I can have my own local “radio stations” of the songs I enjoy. Then months later, when/if I got bored of them, I can go back to AccuRadio and see what new songs they added in the meantime.
I just occasionally load up a whole folder of my mp3 collection and shuffle :D
Removed by mod
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?
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!
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 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)
There was a time I used Plex with PlexAmp for music, pretty sure it kept stats
So what happens to the data? As far as I can see you’re uploading your music listens to the service and you don’t have a private profile, it’s always public and everything is being provided as a download for everybody. So everybody can get the full amount of my listening history, including Metadata telling them for example when I was awake, listened to sad songs or drinking songs on a thursday night?
I felt a bit weird about it at first, but the one thing keeping me tied to Spotify was how useful it was for discovering new music (though even that had been degrading by the time I cancelled it).
If you’re someone who either prefers to listen to music that they already know and love, or someone who enjoys discovering new music through manual effort, then Listenbrainz isn’t for you
However, if you’re currently relying on the recommendations of a service like Spotify, then it’s at least worth considering. For me, I became a lot more at ease with Listenbrainz when I realised that this kind of music recommendation simply isn’t possible without other people’s data — and that part of the “price” for being able to access recommendations built from that data is that my listening history gets added to the pool of listening data used by the recommendation system.
If it’s Spotify’s pool that I’m contributing to, then I feel like I’m getting a pretty bad deal, because they hoard that data like a digital dragon, and then use it to further entrench their monopolistic position in the market. I don’t like that — it makes me feel complicit in the grossness.
Whereas with Listenbrainz, I’m contributing to a data commons of sorts. Listenbrainz’s recommendation algorithm has gotten so much better in the couple of years that I’ve been using it, and that wouldn’t be possible without a growing pool of data. Independent researchers and developers are able to benefit from it, and the more people we have making stuff in this space, the more we chip away at Spotify’s power.
Like I said, having my data be so public does make me feel a tad uneasy, but with data like this, it tends to only be valuable in bulk (meaning the system doesn’t care about any individual’s sad drinking songs), or hypothetically, to individuals who are excessively concerned with another individual (such as stalkers, I guess). However, that last point doesn’t concern me, because I made my Listenbrainz account under a username that’s unconnected to any of my others, and my profile shows no indication of who I am on Spotify.
I’m sure that someone dedicated and skilled enough could retrieve my Spotify account name from the system, because I linked my account way back when I did have Spotify, but I trust Listenbrainz with my data a hell of a lot more than I do Spotify. Spotify definitely have way more money to hire cybersecurity folk to prevent exfiltration of user data, but they’re so opaque that even if there were a breach, I wouldn’t trust them to tell me. I’ve been following Listenbrainz’s development for a while, and they’re pretty cautious and transparent with how they go about things.
To be clear, I’m not formally affiliated with Listenbrainz in any way. I have contributed to improving documentation a few times (because that’s usually the best way I can support open source projects, as a mediocre programmer), but that stems from the same thing that made me write this comment: I just really like what they’re trying to do, and I think the world would be a little better if more people joined it. (also, I am just a huge nerd for metadata schema, and the affiliated musicbrainz project has so much cool stuff for me to learn about)
Yeah, I think one issue is how this aggregate data is being provided for download. Is it really “this user has listened to this song on this day at this minute”, or is it kind of an aggregate data like “users who listen to Metallica also listen to Pantera” and “the most listened song for Taylor Swift is shake it off”?
Yes I think it is like you describe.
Here is someone from MetaBrainz explaining why.
Yes, there is not a feature for private profiles. If your listening data is a privacy concern to you it’s better not to use LB.
Such a great service.
Both it and musicbrainz.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
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.
Got the app on my phone and the player on my PC is linked and donated $5. Listen brainz is a treasure that will pay dividends to open source for years to come.
Yessss! I am so jazzed to see other people in this thread who love Listenbrainz as much as I do.
I will always love it because it was my first ever contribution to open source software. It was only documentation, because I’m a mediocre programmer, but documentation is a big deal for projects like these.
What I really liked about contributing is that I felt a real sense of contributing to something bigger than myself. I mean, I feel that with the fact that my listening data gets added to the pool itself, but I felt it even more so when helping with the documentation.
It was only something small, but I liked the idea that I was helping future tinkerers experience a little less frustration than I felt when I struggled with the outdated documentation. It made me happy to think that I was facilitating more people to tinker. I may only be a mediocre programmer, but that just means I am well placed to help pave the way for people more skilled than I am. This is the kind of project that I want to exist in the world, and so helping to support it genuinely makes me feel a little more hopeful in the face of this increasingly enshittified world
