Last.fm for Spotify

Every now and again two things come together that make perfect sense, sometimes by design and sometimes just by natural affinity: gin and tonic, cheese and tomato, Jagger and Richards, Lennon and McCartney… two things that get better when they’re together.

Today Spotify announced that they’re opening their platform up to apps, and Last.fm is going to be one of their launch partners.

Introducing Last.fm for Spotify: personalised recommendations based on the music you play.

Track: “Calm Down” by Canterbury

Ever since Spotify launched, I’ve heard many people suggest that Last.fm and Spotify each do different but essential things they want from a music service. Spotify integrated Last.fm scrobbling into their service almost from day one, but scrobbling on its own really didn’t connect the two services meaningfully enough.

I remember saying the exact same thing long before coming to work at Last.fm. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could somehow use Last.fm’s recommendations to decide what to play on Spotify?” Some of our community even used our APIs to build homebrew versions of it.

So when, earlier this summer, Spotify came to us to talk about their new platform and asked us “what would you do if..?”, it took us just a few seconds to agree that this was a massive opportunity to create something that we’d want to use ourselves, every day. It was a chance to take the scrobbles we were getting from Spotify users and then pay them back, with interest, in the form of great recommendations.

So what does Last.fm for Spotify do?

You can:
• Sign in to Last.fm, or start a new profile (new users have a very easy setup process)
• The overview page displays the listener’s recent top albums…
• …some recommendations
• …their recent tracks
• …and some of their loved tracks
• The Albums and Recommended tabs in the app will offer a deeper insight into those lists
• The app will allow users to build playlists of recommendations, top albums, recent tracks and loved tracks with just one click
• It also powers a Now Playing screen, which features scrobbling stats about artists
• …and users can launch a Similar Tracks playlist from the song currently playing in that tab
• And yes, it scrobbles too

Spotify users without a Last.fm account will be able to use the Now Playing view and Similar Artist playlists, but the personalised experiences are only available to new or existing Last.fm users. As ever, the more you use it, the better those personalised recommendations get.

The one-click playlists really are effortless, and you can play them on any Spotify app (mobile, etc.)



If you want to try this out for yourself, Spotify have a preview version you can download now. It’s going to be going out to the wider world very very soon. You can send us feedback in the Last.fm for Spotify forum as soon as you start using it.

We’re really excited to see this in the wild. We’re big fans of Spotify at Last.HQ, and a lot of work has gone into making this a great experience for old and new users.

Enjoy!