I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into.
But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it.
I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.
The album chart queries are also incredible. The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors so you can find exactly what you want.
simple, very little time investment required and avoids most modern fuckery
My problem with this is that it makes certain assumptions about the consistency of applying genres and about the very concept of genre which (imo) is more of a social construct than an empirical concept. It falls in the same category as religion-sect, language-dialect.
I'm just wondering how a strong community like that was struck a deathblow. It's not like all of its content disappeared.
I would say all other media (or at least, the media I care about - film, tv, books) has what.cd equivalents, sometimes multiple. I think Spotify and AM killed 95%+ of “true” private tracker interest for music, especially with lossless and surround releases being available. The diehard core are still there (names from 15 years ago are still active) but it’s really not the same.
Granted you can set up automated *arr systems with PLEXAMP to get a pretty seamless "personal Spotify" setup IME getting true usefulness out of trackers of What's quality always required spending real money - to obtain rare records/CDs on marketplaces - or at least large amounts of time if you went the "rent CDs from the library" route. I personally haven't ran into much RYM releases lacking on Apple Music and what is lacking I can find on Bandcamp or YouTube.
You can even save their top songs as an auto-updating playlist. It's a great way to find new music that is not controlled by algorithms.
Here's my profile if anyone wants to have a look: https://volt.fm/soheilpro
This has been until very recently the modus operandi of most recommendation engine algorithms. If an algorithm is essentially doing what you do, would you not like that?
”If take human out … why human there no more???”
It’s shocking this species is able to come up with such advanced technologies when the above is the existential question that plagues them in the macro.
The worst was Pandora, which did recommendations based on breakdown of musical instruments and elements in the song. It did what it aimed to do pretty well, only it was a bad idea. It gave you a lot of uninspiring music that sounded like a bland copy of something you actually liked.
Spotify's recommendations are not super awful, but definitely feel closer to Pandora's style. I wonder why is the result like that even though I'm sure they train their model based on listening history.