Last.fm

Last.fm invented a way of thinking about music listening that turned out to be decades ahead of its time — the idea that tracking every song a person has ever played, building a precise listening history, and using that data to recommend music and connect listeners with similar tastes would be compelling. Launched in 2002, its "scrobbling" system predated recommendation algorithms at Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube by years and created an intensely loyal user base that maintained detailed listening histories through ownership changes from CBS Interactive to Viacom/Paramount over the following two decades. The site's social features — recommendations, compatible users, listening trends — gave it a community depth that pure audio streaming services lacked.

Last.fm operates as a meta-layer that sits on top of other music services rather than primarily as a streaming platform itself. Scrobbling — the act of submitting played track information to Last.fm's database — happens through integrations with Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, desktop media players like foobar2000, and many other clients. The Last.fm backend receives these scrobble submissions, stores them against user accounts, and uses the accumulated data to calculate recommendations, top charts, and similar artist networks. The API that powers third-party scrobbling clients is a critical piece of infrastructure distinct from the main website.

When Last.fm has problems, they surface in a specific way — played tracks stop appearing in the listening history, "Recent Tracks" freezes on the last successfully scrobbled item, and artists that should be accumulating plays show no new counts. The scrobbling queue, which buffers unsubmitted scrobbles locally when the Last.fm API is unavailable, can overflow or fail to flush properly when service restores, resulting in gaps in the listening history that cannot be retroactively filled. The website's recommendation engine, which depends on the ongoing stream of fresh listening data, may serve stale or degraded recommendations during extended API outages.

Outage.gg tracks Last.fm service status using community reports from users and scrobblers. If the Last.fm API is down, scrobbles are not submitting, or the website is unavailable, the live status page shows current impact.