Tag: last.fm (page 1 of 1)

a construction engineer holding and reviewing blueprints

December 7, 2025 / 0 Comments

How I Made My 2025 Music Recap

I spent most of my free time over the last week turning twelve months of Last.fm scrobbles into something resembling what I might get from the digital music streaming platforms. The goal was to achieve narrative clarity about how my listening habits are shaped by genre, vibe, purpose, and pattern.

Two things became obvious fast:

The raw data is messy. Pulling a year of listening into a meaningful shape requires way more cleaning, classification, and context than I had done since switching from Spotify to Tidal. I’m not Every Noise at Once.
The story isn’t in the numbers alone. Meaning can’t be easily derived from play counts alone.

I wanted to be a more intentional listener this year, leaving Spotify’s algorithmic overreach for a more human, artist-centric product experience in Tidal. I achieved that. Now, if I feel like I’m in a rut, I can’t really blame the technology. I have to work my way out of it. Building more playlists helps with that, as does trying out more of the user playlists that the platform’s home page surfaces to me.

The Sources

Three inputs shaped the foundation:

Last.fm scrobble history for every play, including timestamps and track-level breadcrumbs.
My own tags and taxonomies:
This year, I built an artist descriptor system to replace Last.fm’s chaotic tag soup. I capped it at three genres and two descriptors per artist. For songs, I added a mood and a mode. I’m sure both dictionaries will expand in 2026.
Context logs:
I tracked my weekly and monthly top performers, which made it easier to tie shifts in listening to what was happening in my own life.

The Tools

A Last.fm data exporter. The one I used always pulls your full history (though you can download partial fills during the process). I’ve found another that allows you to draw an update based on a timestamp. I’ll be using it going forward unless I come across something better.
Google Sheets for merging, normalizing, and verifying counts.
A personal KPI tracker to keep genre weights, album totals, and monthly shifts consistent.
ChatGPT as an analyst assistant, primarily for structuring and processing data logs, similar to how I use AI to assist me at work, where I also have limited resources. It helped me think through how I wanted to set up a data analysis framework, and then I implemented it in tools outside the LLM that aren’t prone to hallucination, bad math, or fantasy. One area I intend to explore early in the new year is AI solutions explicitly designed for data analysis and exploration. I’ve gotten to play around with these kinds of tools in some enterprise products and marketing analytics tools, which I’ve found exciting and delightful, but as I have noted throughout this year, making this stuff work requires a ton of thoughtful setup under the hood.

The Structure

45 Descriptors (like 1980s or Underground or The South)

19 Genres (like Hip-Hop, Funk, or K-Pop)

12 Moods (like Cinematic, Energetic, or Spiritual)

12 Modes (like New Day Vibes, Working Out, or Still Processing)

I enjoy the classification process despite (or perhaps because) how challenging and time-consuming it is. I learned during my Paramount+ days that building a single, consistent metadata system is hard, and few want to own it.

I get it. It’s daunting to take on this task even if you’re the lone customer, but c’est la vie.

The Playlists

I do a lot more playlist management on Tidal than I ever did on Spotify, and this process has encouraged me to create more playlists.

Colorful gradient background featuring the text 'NEW DAY Vibes' curated by Jason Toney

Cover art for a music playlist titled 'THE COOL DOWN', featuring a cosmic-themed illustration of a purple planet surrounded by stars, with the subtitle 'music for heavy eyelids' and curated by Jason Toney.

You can find all my publicly available playlists on my profile.

The Stats

42.6k streams
17.3k tracks
9.8k albums
5.2k artists
~53% of my spins this year were categorized.

Top Artists

Top Albums

A grid of album covers showcasing popular tracks including 'GNX' by Kendrick Lamar and 'Let God Sort Em Out' by Clipse, along with their respective play counts.

The 2025 Mixtape

Improvements for 2026

On Saturday morning, I spun up a BigQuery project connected to a Google Colab notebook so I can process my Last.fm data at scale. Each month, I’ll ingest new scrobbles, update artist and song classifications, and sync them all to my active playlists.

The goal is 80% classification over the next 12 months. I want a much more comprehensive understanding of my listening patterns, defined on my terms.

The one data point I’m still missing: song length. The public metadata ecosystem is thin, and time-listened has become the backbone metric of every streaming recap. Getting accurate, open song-duration data may be an uphill battle.

Is it weird that I have been having a lot of fun nerding out on this little data project?

December 5, 2024 / 2 Comments

Spotify Wrapped 2024: Not Handled with Care

Dr. Georgie Carroll, an Australian fan Engagement Expert, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday that “Spotify Wrapped learned a hard lesson today: data isn’t enough.”

Indeed. The true value of data lies in the connections we find and the stories we tell. In the past, Spotify’s human curators would weave these narratives, aligning the recap with the cultural and musical zeitgeist, rather than just showcasing the Company’s technological prowess.

For example, using the Musical Evolution Cards as a starting point, I delved into my journals, my last.fm profile, and my memories to piece together a narrative that was more than just a jumble of words and AI-generated podcasts.

I’m a fan of NotebookLM and its potential as a research tool, but the podcast creation here was nothing more than a parlor trick. Until AI can approximate a lived experience that reflects and remixes what it has learned about me and finds something more profound, it is nothing more than soulless novelty.

I want two things from any recap of my content consumption:

A map of my year that might reveal something that I wouldn’t otherwise see or remember as it was happening
Breadcrumbs that might inform where I should go next in my entertainment journey

Since its launch, Wrapped has been good at showing listeners where they sit in audience clusters on the service. It’s one of the reasons I lament the degradation of The “Sounds of Spotify” playlists over the last 12 months. In 2022 and 2023, Wrapped told me what genres I most enjoyed (with increasing nuance and specificity), and they had playlists that showcased the core sound, pulse, and outer bounds of those genres that I could dig into and follow. New and old music would funnel my way through those algorithmically driven curations and they had a strong hit rate for my ears.

They laid off the person who created Every Noise at Once, the algorithm that powers those playlists, right after Wrapped was released last year. So, 2024 Wrapped features none of those breadcrumbs that would have been generated by this lovingly managed cluster model. Instead, I turned to last.fm again to see if I could determine my preferred genres and subgenres. It’s not nearly the same, but we make do.

With a little effort, I can see that neo-soul, female vocalists, West Coast hip hop, Memphis hip hop, and electronic dance grooves were my genres of choice this year.

When I look to refine and expand my listening in 2025, jazz, including nu-jazz, alt-rnb, post-rock, and LA hip-hop, are subgenres I should explore further.

As tech companies in media trend towards investing in the promise of future tech over people with taste and a fundamental grounding in the living world, we must seek out the storytellers on our own.

I love data, and I love stories. Thanks to last.fm for allowing me to tell my own story independent of digital music platforms. They are not a sponsor of this post, but I have been a fan and a user for nearly 20 years.

January 9, 2022 / 0 Comments

How to Read and other links for my last day of PTO

The love of my life shared this piece by Kate Harding yesterday and as she tweeted: [this is good]

“Today’s reader will simply not accept the baton being passed. If something is unclear, the author must expand; if something offends, the author must account and atone.”

I was drawn to fashion articles this week, including this WSJ story about ‘kid core.’ I love the hero image of a man at Paris fashion week looking like every member of the Cosby Kids at once. Dressing like a tween is not for me at this big age, but some of the sneakers I’ve been purchasing and eyeing have a distinct hint of playfulness. Also, black people look great in bold colors!

Also, The decades-old aesthetic that imagines the cultural and technological wealth of a Black future is thriving yet again.

“The biscuit, too, deserves a celebration.”

Still She Rises by Jasmin Pittman Morrell

Chinese names are incredibly purposeful. […] First up is the family name, known as the last name in many Western cultures and similarly taken from the father’s side. This is followed by a name that is shared with your generation, often paternal cousins. Finally, there is the person’s individual name. These names literally show not only our ties to family and history, but how we put them first.

Marian Chia-Ming Liu

“For the past two years, the public company, called Magazine Luiza, or Magalu, has limited its executive trainee program for recent college graduates — a pipeline to well-paying, senior roles — to Black applicants.”

Also, from the NYT, Siddhartha Miller writes about an artist and New Orleans, a place I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

Last, but not least, I kinda miss the bloghouse days. Maybe some Justice and Spank Rock will end up in my scrobbles this week.

December 26, 2014 / 0 Comments

My Favorite Music of 2014

“When everything’s clear like cold water go feel better.“ – Little Dragon, Klapp Klapp

I rather enjoyed music this year. As I spent time re-listening to albums and songs in preparation for this post, I realized how much music I heard that I thought was genuinely good and interesting. In the midst of all the cotton candy confection on terrestrial radio and vine—a place that increasingly became where I discovered new to me sounds and artists and songs, some of which I actually liked—there were a lot of artists releasing confident and risk-taking songs and albums.

It almost seems anachronistic for artists to attempt to put out complete and connected albums with strong thematic ties or storytelling flourishes today. We live in the age of the eternally shuffled on streaming services like Spotify and Pandora and Rdio (my personal fave). The music video (even if it’s just lyrics or a static image) and soundcloud dominate the young ear. So why put together an album whose songs work better together? Especially with the standard being about 10 songs and 45 minutes these days? I don’t know but I’m glad folks did.

My Favorite Albums of 2014

Some notes: D’Angelo did me dirty like Beyoncé did last December and put out an album that’s impossible to deny but that I haven’t had the time to sit with like I have with other albums. In fact, Black Messiah’s inclusion bumped Mary J. Blige’s The London Sessions—another late in the year entry—out of my top ten but you should really cop that one too. You’ll also have to forgive the nepotism but my sister’s album is good y’all.

Little Dragon, Prince, and Freddie Gibbs with Madlib on the production produced the albums I kept coming back to this year, though. Every time I hear just one song from their releases I want to hear the whole collection. Art Official Cage is a revelation. I haven’t enjoyed the purple one this much since the Batman soundtrack.

Like Pusha T’s album last year, Piñata was the get hyped soundtrack for 2014. I bumped that in the car on road trips, in the morning on the ride to work, on the way home to take the edge off (or get it up). I was Thuggin’.

Ultimately, though, there’s a certain sound and sensibility that gets to me (gets me) more than everything else. Little Dragon is one of those bands and Nabuma Rubberband is one of those albums. Love it.

Other albums worthy of consideration – Michael Jackson’s XSCAPE; Kelis’s Food; alt-J’s This is All Yours; FKA Twigs – LP1; Sam Smith’s In The Lonely Hour; Jóhan Jóhannsson’s The Theory of Everything soundtrack; The Juan Mclean’s In A Dream; and, Nicki Minaj’s The Pinkprint

The Top Songs of 2014

Rdio helpfully made a playlist. It’s pretty accurate although last.fm notes a few differences. Klapp Klapp was the song I went back to the most this year though less so in the last quarter of 2014. Drake’s 0 to 100/The Catch Up and D’Angelo’s Sugah Daddy deserve mention for the back 90 of this year.

Two important musical notes for me at the end of 2014 came out 22 and 25 years ago but seemed especially relevant for the complex ways I was/am feeling about the world. The hope and clarity of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 and the anger and obstinance of Ice Cube’s The Predator were what my soul needed as America in the Fall of this year felt more like Los Angeles in the Spring of ’92. Rage and sadness and uprising and the knowledge and power to the people.

We are a part of a rhythm nation and 20 years after Rodney King we’re still asking “when will they shoot?” and so we’re going to make it rough.

August 2, 2013 / 2 Comments

The Quantified Jason

“Tell me the truth am I losing you for good?” – Solange, Losing You

I didn’t go to the gym yesterday. I bargained with myself around 9pm at the moment when I was either going to put on my tennis shoes or curl up on the couch with Wolverine. I argued that my tooth hurt and that it was too late and I could just double up on Friday. Ultimately, though, this was the winning argument: it wouldn’t count.

My fitbit ultra had been dying for much of the last month and finally kicked the bucket on Wednesday in the middle of my workout. I had already bought a flex to replace it but it came missing the wireless dongle over the weekend so I was now in this un-trackable abyss. While I mostly held to the habits I’ve developed while using the device, I took the elevator for the first time in months at work. Without regularly checking my steps, I found fewer reasons to get up and move. And I didn’t workout yesterday because I wouldn’t get the sense of accomplishment I get every time I see I’ve hit my goal and leapfrogged my friends and knew that my good marks for the day would go on my permanent record.

I’m a sucker for the quantified self (a topic of which my friend, lynne, is very fond). Scrobbling music to last.fm is the biggest reason why I listen to just about everything digitally. I check into foursquare and getglue for the same reasons. I want the data. I want the history and insights. I want the real.

If some cloud service has no record of it did it really happen?

I’m joking. Sort of.

My fitbit wireless dongle arrived today, though.

And I’m about to lace up my gym shoes and go workout.

Because it counts.

Bonus: My favorite workout tracks of the last 12 months (semi-regularly updated)