20 Years on Last.fm: A Retrospective
December 9th, 2004.
That’s my registration date on Audioscrobbler Last.fm. Just for a quick frame of reference, MF DOOM’s “Mm..Food” and Eminem’s “Encore” albums were released a month earlier, American Idiot by Green Day was the most popular song on the radio, and the TV series LOST was in its heyday. As a former Lostie, that one Jack Shepard quote seems quite apropos for this piece—”We have to go back!”
20 years really does fly by. I’m 36 now (which seemed ancient to a 15-year-old me), and I made my account about four months into my sophomore year of high school. I don’t even remember where I had the idea to sign up. I’m sure there’s some relic of an inactive message board account pre-dating 2004 that holds all of the clues, but it seems that Last.fm is that red string of fate still connecting me to the early aughts.
It’s a bit strange to even look at that date and paint it tangibly into my current world. I can tell you about the house I lived in at the time, and the subsequent one bedroom apartments and financial hardships that soon followed. Those years nestled a precarious box of ambitions and tangerine dreams that got shot down or accomplished in the future pursuit of happiness. Hey, I was just trying to enjoy life as a high school teenager getting some buzz making rap mixtapes with my best friend.
Music has always helped me drown out the noise. As we speed forward into uncertain times, it’s becoming more and more essential to find social media we’re actually able to detach from (an oxymoron)—if only to catch one’s breath in a nook for a few minutes… Resident Evil save room style. Last.fm, much like Letterboxd or Tumblr, has always been a bit of a safe haven to help me step away from digital overload whilst still in the digital world.
Anecdotes From The Early Days
Image source: Pearl Pu
I’m somebody who generally accepts change without much fuss—new designs, features, and aesthetics come and go. But man, the Last.fm radio was a bastion of online music discovery at the time it existed. It managed to pick out adjacent artists who sounded similar sonically, but it also didn’t regurgitate it from music you had already listened to. Plus, keep in mind, we were barely removed from the RIAA putting the fear of God into netizens attempting to pirate music. This was the Wild West era of tiptoeing LimeWire virus minefields every time you downloaded Linkin Park MP3s.
I also remember the Greasemonkey Firefox extensions that had a bunch of quality of life additions with added stats to keep things fresh. Andrew Wilkinson made a personal favorite of mine that showed how your charts moved daily with little up and down arrows. Simple and effective.
Apparently, you can still access any old Last.fm journal by typing in last.fm/user/namehere/journal, provided you journaled when it was still active. Not sure I want to re-visit faux-deep poems I would post on here for some reason—I’ll take a peek behind the curtain when I’m brave enough to face my past cringe.
Lastly, the Last.fm forums. Okay, I’m sort of realizing now how much has been taken away from us… and it’s mildly frustrating. I didn’t frequent the forums too often, but I feel like, at the very least, they could’ve fostered some sort of RYM-level userbase that rivaled reddit as a community for music discussion. Bring back message boards. I love googling some random niche or hobby and seeing a bustling stamp or ceramics board that nobody even knew existed.
You had a decent chance of running into some well-known musicians:
?uestlove from The Roots follows me. I remember him posting about it somewhere and getting a follow back from him. (Funnily enough, Prince and J.Dilla take the cake as his top artists, not The Roots.)
Jyoti Mishra is also still an active user! He made the massive 90s pop hit White Town - Your Woman. I’m sure there’s a bunch of musicians with hidden accounts as well.
My Music Taste Throughout The Years, 2005-2025
2005
At the age of 15, I was already pretty heavily into underground and conscious hip-hop at the time. I was active on rap message boards where I’d write lyrics and poems and rap battle people for fun, so none of my top artists are too surprising. What you will notice though is how my taste actually gets more and more mainstream throughout the years, at least as far as hip-hop goes. I would guess for most people it’s the opposite, but I was heavy on music self discovery from a young age, even going so far as to say that I was a bit of an elitist. Then I realized nobody actually cared about taste, and to listen to whatever the fuck I actually enjoyed—even if it felt like a guilty pleasure. I’ll also say that as streaming services started to pop up more and more in the early 2010s, even though I had unlimited, instant access to more music than I could ever dream of just 5 years before, the interest to put in the effort of finding new music waned, and instead I was influenced by media I consumed or friends recommending music they thought I’d enjoy.
2006
Going to write less personal anecdotes nobody really cares about from here on out, but I’ll note where I find interesting listening habits occurring. Somehow, Kanye West completely disappeared this year despite being first in 2005. Back then, artists who dropped recent albums or tapes would often find themselves on the top of my list for the year. Sounds like a “duh” statement, but some years I kinda just settle in with my comfort artists and call it a day.
(Editor’s Note: 2006 was the only year where Kanye didn’t drop an album in a 5-year span.)
The most drastic change though, and one of the most notable for this entire 20 year retrospective, is how Nick Drake found himself in a grid full of rappers. Keep an eye on that and watch how my tastes begin to morph after being introduced to alternate/indie/folk/etc sort of music.
(Also, 2006 marks the year where I listened to the most music in one calendar year. It’s all downhill from here.)
2007
My high school graduation year. Lupe is really doing well, huh? My mind might be misleading me, but I swear I remember being one of Lupe’s first listeners on Last.fm or uploading one of his first photos at the time. My friend had showed me something he did before he ever showed up on “Touch The Sky”, and I remember thinking how dope he was and hoping he’d blow up.
This is the year where my music taste is fully integrated with a bunch of different genres. The Smiths, Nick Drake, Draft Punk, Eddie Hazel, Radiohead, Marvin Gate, Blind Melon*, etc.
(*My second-cousin was in Blind Melon! Christopher Thorn. It’s a shame that Shannon Hoon died, because they were starting to really take off and make quite a big name for themselves. I know they were at Woodstock, on David Letterman, on the Rolling Stones cover, went multi-platinum, etc.)
2008
Tons of Blind Melon this year because I had saw them live that year. Also, I swear… Joe Budden actually had good music at one point and he’s not only a controversial podcast host. This is the first year I look at my grid and just kinda go, “Huh?”
I remember liking all of these artists at one point or another, but this grid just looks gross to me. Not sure why.
2009
I’ll have to apologize to those who hate him, because this begins a long stretch of years where Drake is the number one artist on my charts. He put out such a large volume of music, and I was the exact target demographic of somebody who was heavily in my feels at the time (in love with a girl from Toronto, no less!), and I still enjoyed hip-hop a lot.
Funnily enough, 2009 marked an exodus of hip-hop artists elsewhere on my charts, being the first year where rap or hip-hop comprised of <%50 of my top artists.
2010
I’m going to let you all in on a secret, The Shins - Turn Me On is my most listened to track of all time.. and it’s because I fell asleep and didn’t notice it was playing all night. I thought about deleting the scrobbles, but it’s been up too long by now, and I love telling people I don’t really care much about that song at all when they ask about it.
Other than that, I saw M83 and Big K.R.I.T. live that year and they were both amazing. Jon Brion is up on the charts because this was the first year I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and to this day, it’s a movie I can’t watch by myself.
2011
I was very sad this year, and you could probably tell by the charts! I was trying to get over a break-up, but I also started seeing a wonderful person towards the end of this year as well, so it’s a real mix of emotional comfort that I was seeking through music. You’ll notice some post-hardcore creeping in with Mogwai, as well as IDM/EDM artists being sprinkled in as well. My dad is a DJ, so I grew up with a lot of 90s house music playing around the house—an influence that has never really gone away.
2012
Rap is back on the menu, boys and girls. I vividly remember seeing Kendrick Lamar live this year. He wasn’t even that big, comparatively to the last 10 years, and the venue he performed in still had me squished against the bar. He had Orlando eating out of the palm of his hand.
In contrast to 2008, the 2012 artists seem to accurately depict a heat chart of genres I still listen to to this day.
2013
I’m actually curious to see when Drake gets dethroned, and by who. He’s on a five year #1 streak right now.
Still a mix of hip-hop and electronic/house music with some post hardcore mixed in.
2014
Oh. I didn’t have to wait long to satiate my curiosity. PARTYNEXTDOOR ices his Toronto brethren from the top spot, but T-Dot is still well represented on the top of the charts as a whole. You’ll notice some hardcore bands starting to appear, like Title Fight and Citizen, which were a definite influence from my most recent ex at the time, who stayed a good friend and kept showing me bands I grew to love.
2015
Future and Drake headline this year at my #1 and #2 spots, even having the #6 spot as Drake & Future. Sheesh. Somehow, I forgot about the resurgence of hip-hop in my charts a decade ago, because the last five or so years seem like I’ve been burnt out from rap, or I’m just having more fun discovering genres that I’ve been ignoring for a while.
2016
Outside of Denzel Curry, The Avalanches, and the hardcore bands, this is the most normie and mainstream chart you’ll see from me. I don’t really know what sort of tastes I had that year, but we all have our off years, okay? I also don’t remember liking any Tory Lanez song that much.
2017
Sampha! I saw him live in Tampa when he was with SBTRKT. That’s still my favorite show I’ve ever been to. It was an intimate, smaller crowd who were wholly in tune with the performers who had everybody on their feet, dancing the night away to a bunch of UK garage and house music. I wasn’t even on any drugs and it still smacked me in the face.
The rest of these charts look off to me because I don’t remember enjoying some of these artists so much. I’d say my 2011-2014 listening habits mirror my taste now more than anything else thus far.
2018
I wrote a lot this year, and Ramin Djawadi’s music often helped inspire creativity when I had writer’s block. This particular Game of Thrones scene is one of my favorite scenes in recent television history.
One thing that I noticed is that the threshold for my top 16 artists of the year isn’t a high bar anymore—you could get in with about 70 listens a year. I think that’s why some artists that have one or two catchy songs end up on the top of my charts, when in reality they’re one hit wonders as far as my listening habits go, and the artists and bands that average about 50 plays a year never pop up. That’s what’s throwing me off.
2019
R.I.P Nipsey. I’m pleasantly surprised to see OPN up there as well, I love his stuff and want to see him live one day.
But finally these charts are starting to resemble the hodgepodge of genres and artists I’ve been listening to lately. Although, now the K-pop revolution is riiiiiiight around the corner.
2020
In 2020, TWICE grabbed me by the collar and said, “You’re going to go down the biggest K-pop rabbit hole, AND I’m taking your lunch money.” And I let them.
I had always been into Korean variety shows like Running Man, and a few other puzzle and competition shows, but I never really paid attention to K-pop music. In one of those shows, they had a karaoke mini-game that played a bunch of old school K-pop, and I started to Shazam the songs, and found myself really digging a lot of the music. Once I saw a TWICE video, I think I binge watched every video they had in the span of a few days. This doesn’t count like 300-400 YouTube plays as well.
Keep your eye out for another K-pop girl group on here that steals my heart eternally the next year. Oh, and Prefab Sprout… I’ll wax poetic about them later.
2021
TWICE opened the door into K-pop for me, and Dreamcatcher drained me for all of my blood. I ended up seeing them live the following year. I was just completely aurally enraptured by them, and I even love their personalities. I can totally see how younger people get sucked in parasocially with K-pop music and idol life… which is a very dangerous (and expensive) setting to find yourself in.
Oh! And before I forget, Underworld, the kings that you are. I’ve been obsessed with them lately. “A Hundred Days Off” may just be in my top five albums of all-time.
2022
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I told you I was down bad for Dreamcatcher. Look at the play disparity between 1st and 2nd place. They had me under a spell for an entire year.
2023
Dreamcatcher is still at the top, but it’s not as bad as 2022. Lexie Liu had a banger of an album dropped in late 2022 that had me in a headlock for a while. I was also starting to branch out and listen to some other K-pop groups like EXO, who are my favorite K-pop boy group, as well as Girls’ Generation and others. TWICE has fallen quite a bit, but they’ll always hold a special place in my heart.
These charts really blend a lot of my old tastes (Drake, Boards of Canada, Sampha), with a mix of K-pop and what’s to come in the future.
2024
The K-pop high wore off a bit in 2024 with only Dreamcatcher and EXO being on my top artists last year. And to be honest, I felt like I didn’t even listen to that much Dreamcatcher. It shows their power still.
This pretty much encapsulates my music tastes the last few years. 80s music, R&B, hip-hop, K-pop, pop, some hardcore, some electronic and house, some indie and alternative… it’s all in my stew.
But the 80s are really calling out to me lately, artists like Kate Bush, Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Tears for Fears, Hall & Oates, etc. You start at Last.fm at 15, and live long enough to slowly watch yourself become your parents.
2025
If you stuck around and checked out every year of my listening history, I love you, and I’ll take you out for Thai food if I ever meet you.
Justin Bieber’s newest work had a few songs that just hit the spot for me, and I’m positive it’s because Dijon and Mk.gee worked heavily with him on it.
Prefab Sprout may be my favorite band of all-time is what I’m slowly realizing. Sophisti-pop perfection. There’s about 20 songs that I can’t believe more people haven’t been writing video essays and dissertations about. Hoping the last season of Stranger Things can catapult their music into the mainstream completely.
Paddy McAloon is also a god-tier writer. I envy his writing ability so much.
What Does The Future Hold For Last.fm?
Last.fm is ultimately like having an old, trusty, aesthetically pleasing storage unit. I did email them not too long ago asking if they’ll ever do anything with their dormant YouTube account or if they need help with it. There’s no reason they can’t be the Letterboxd of the music world, who at least have a bit of social cache and can pump out some entertaining content with film stars and directors. There’s still so much potential with Last.fm that it makes me a bit sad observing them operate like a truncated Frankenstein without any desire to do more than required. But I’m the last person who should speak about wasted potential. And just like me—there’s still hope yet.
