last.fm

[d.yaro]

I've basically bailed out of there. I deleted my scrobbler software ages ago. I erased all my scrobbles, individually, save for three. The group pages have not been brought back. Nor has the forum. There's no point in hanging out there anymore.

[beken]

I've deleted the scrobbler off my iMac and disconnected it from iTunes. Only scrobbling will be done if I play something on Spotify.

[d.yaro]

I went back and checked my profile. There were a few scrobbles I missed in my purge. Time to clear them out too.

[Zin5ki]

I never quite understood what a 'scrobble' actually was...

[beken]

I think what eventually happened was last.fm accumulated a list of YOUR music. When you scrobbled, you actually copied your music up to their server and they hoped we would eventually pay them money to manage our music on their servers. I think they did perform a service of keeping track of play counts, categorizing music and recommending like artists and recommending friends to social network with who had similar tastes in music. However, I think changes in privacy law messed up most of the recommendation part, and the copyright/pirate accusation issue messed up the part about allowing you to share your music. So the business case for Last.fm that might allow them to eek out some revenue all disappeared. I think the groups thing got shelved because the music industry just does not allow for combining libraries of more than one "license holder" for each tune.

[d.yaro]

I checked my account and the company had reloaded all the data I had deleted. There is no option to delete the data. So I deleted my account. There. Done.