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.
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?
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.
Can someone explain to a Gen x guy what “listening data” gets me? I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years. Does this use my music? Does this get it from the Internet somewhere? How is it different from asking Alexa to play music for me? Thanks.
I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years.
Same here. I love that shit. My mood is the algorithm. I still occasionally get new stuff, but from other sources I happen to see or hear, like a Netflix show that has it in the background or a musician’s personal recommendation in an interview, and I go look it up manually. But even if I never got anything new, I already have more music than I could easily listen to in a lifetime that I already know I liked at least once.
I’ve tried streaming sources, but it never hits right. This way, where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right, always fresh, and I’m always listening to something I want to hear.
where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right
That’s a remarkable level of effort, these days. Yes, I know, it’s trivial compared to pulling vinyl from the sleeve and flipping it every 20 minutes the way I used to before 1985, but… I prefer to put in my music effort with focus, and let a mix algorithm surprise me when I’m not in “music picking mode.” To me, it’s much more enjoyable to hear a song I like that I wasn’t expecting than it is to think about it, navigate the list of thousands to find my pick, and then hear the thing I was thinking of.
I’ve been using LastFM for nearly two decades now. First of all, having personal listening statistics is kind of fun. It might be not for everybody, but it’s nice to see which albums are your most played over a year or what you listened to back in 2015, how your favorite artists changed, which album really vibed with you and so on.
Second, you can get really good recommendations for new music when you have a larger user base and are running into a smaller genres. So just like Amazon’s and people who bought this product also bought that product for music. So people who listen to Britney Spiels also like to listen to Christina Aguilera. That might be obvious for you, but it’s totally interesting if you go down some of these genres and if you want to explore them.
And on a broader scale, listening data is quite valuable to create a good music service. So if somebody never heard of a band called Deep Purple and wants to change that, there might be this one song everybody knows from Deep Purple. And this is, of course, the most popular, but how do you find out that this is the most popular? So if you have your own Jellyfin installation, you load in several albums of Deep Purple, but you need some data source to tell you that ‘smoke on the water’ is that famous song from Deep Purple that everybody’s listening to.
I love listening stats, I just don’t need to share them, and for that I have Navidrome. I use subsonic clients and a Navidrome server for my Bandcamp purchased. I get the stats and privacy too…
It’s a scrobbling service. You send your listening data to it so that you can see your listening habits and share them with other people (your top songs, which countries the artists you listen to are from, etc.). It’s just interesting data that some people like to collect, but if you only throw on your mp3s and don’t care about that, then you probably won’t find much use in setting it up.
Edit: to clarify what “listening data” means here, it just means the metadata of the music you play. Song name, artist, album. Nothing fancy. I think it also supports marking songs as favorites.
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!
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!
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 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
Such a great service.
Both it and musicbrainz.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.
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.
Is there no way of connecting it to Qobuz? I can’t seem to find it.
If you listen on Android, you can use PanoScrobbler. I suspect their are ways on other platforms as well
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 :(
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
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.
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I like using symfonium for my music player, maybe it could be integrated.
I use Symfonium to play my Jellyfin library, and Jellyfin has a plugin for ListenBrainz integration. So depending on your setup, there already is integration!
Doesn’t look like it has Plex support?
ListenBrainz
I saw that as well so I have left Plex scrobing to Last.FM, then Listenbrainz can pull the data from there.
- Eavesdrop.FM, submits Plex music listening data to ListenBrainz
- phooks, a python script that submits local Plex listens using web hooks and file lookups
Thanks!
If there is a plugin, everything is (sort of) supported.
Jellyfin has a listenbrainz plugin.
“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.
I’m the exact opposite. I love services recommending new artists and songs I would have never stumbled into on my own
