I felt a bit weird about it at first, but the one thing keeping me tied to Spotify was how useful it was for discovering new music (though even that had been degrading by the time I cancelled it).

If you’re someone who either prefers to listen to music that they already know and love, or someone who enjoys discovering new music through manual effort, then Listenbrainz isn’t for you

However, if you’re currently relying on the recommendations of a service like Spotify, then it’s at least worth considering. For me, I became a lot more at ease with Listenbrainz when I realised that this kind of music recommendation simply isn’t possible without other people’s data — and that part of the “price” for being able to access recommendations built from that data is that my listening history gets added to the pool of listening data used by the recommendation system.

If it’s Spotify’s pool that I’m contributing to, then I feel like I’m getting a pretty bad deal, because they hoard that data like a digital dragon, and then use it to further entrench their monopolistic position in the market. I don’t like that — it makes me feel complicit in the grossness.

Whereas with Listenbrainz, I’m contributing to a data commons of sorts. Listenbrainz’s recommendation algorithm has gotten so much better in the couple of years that I’ve been using it, and that wouldn’t be possible without a growing pool of data. Independent researchers and developers are able to benefit from it, and the more people we have making stuff in this space, the more we chip away at Spotify’s power.

Like I said, having my data be so public does make me feel a tad uneasy, but with data like this, it tends to only be valuable in bulk (meaning the system doesn’t care about any individual’s sad drinking songs), or hypothetically, to individuals who are excessively concerned with another individual (such as stalkers, I guess). However, that last point doesn’t concern me, because I made my Listenbrainz account under a username that’s unconnected to any of my others, and my profile shows no indication of who I am on Spotify.

I’m sure that someone dedicated and skilled enough could retrieve my Spotify account name from the system, because I linked my account way back when I did have Spotify, but I trust Listenbrainz with my data a hell of a lot more than I do Spotify. Spotify definitely have way more money to hire cybersecurity folk to prevent exfiltration of user data, but they’re so opaque that even if there were a breach, I wouldn’t trust them to tell me. I’ve been following Listenbrainz’s development for a while, and they’re pretty cautious and transparent with how they go about things.

To be clear, I’m not formally affiliated with Listenbrainz in any way. I have contributed to improving documentation a few times (because that’s usually the best way I can support open source projects, as a mediocre programmer), but that stems from the same thing that made me write this comment: I just really like what they’re trying to do, and I think the world would be a little better if more people joined it. (also, I am just a huge nerd for metadata schema, and the affiliated musicbrainz project has so much cool stuff for me to learn about)

Yes, there is not a feature for private profiles. If your listening data is a privacy concern to you it’s better not to use LB.

What has worked nice for me is to listen to the AccuRadio channel of the genre I’m in the mood for, and rate the songs. Then later when I have the time, I look at my ratings history page and download the ones I rated high from youtube in mp3, so I can have my own local “radio stations” of the songs I enjoy. Then months later, when/if I got bored of them, I can go back to AccuRadio and see what new songs they added in the meantime.

Depends. LB supports traditional Lastfm scrobling, so you can use players that scrobbles to Lastfm if you can change the URL

The in-app player is more limited, but a good old Navidrome instance is plenty enough!

apparently it has navidrome support :) navidrome enables you to have your own music library on a device from that you then stream it on your other devices

The other way around, and yes.

https://kawaiidango.github.io/pano-scrobbler/ is one example, but most decent Desktop/Mobile applications have some sort of plugin.

Depends on the app.
If it caches the plays and syncs it back to the scrobble service?
Probably possible.
Afaik it’s not possible for Jellyfin.

It depends on your preferences, but myself I just like knowing what I listen to a lot and send my monthly cover art collage to brag about my blorbos

The player / radio are nice, but I personally created my own radio generator based on my data

I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years.

Same here. I love that shit. My mood is the algorithm. I still occasionally get new stuff, but from other sources I happen to see or hear, like a Netflix show that has it in the background or a musician’s personal recommendation in an interview, and I go look it up manually. But even if I never got anything new, I already have more music than I could easily listen to in a lifetime that I already know I liked at least once.

I’ve tried streaming sources, but it never hits right. This way, where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right, always fresh, and I’m always listening to something I want to hear.

I’ve been using LastFM for nearly two decades now. First of all, having personal listening statistics is kind of fun. It might be not for everybody, but it’s nice to see which albums are your most played over a year or what you listened to back in 2015, how your favorite artists changed, which album really vibed with you and so on.

Second, you can get really good recommendations for new music when you have a larger user base and are running into a smaller genres. So just like Amazon’s and people who bought this product also bought that product for music. So people who listen to Britney Spiels also like to listen to Christina Aguilera. That might be obvious for you, but it’s totally interesting if you go down some of these genres and if you want to explore them.

And on a broader scale, listening data is quite valuable to create a good music service. So if somebody never heard of a band called Deep Purple and wants to change that, there might be this one song everybody knows from Deep Purple. And this is, of course, the most popular, but how do you find out that this is the most popular? So if you have your own Jellyfin installation, you load in several albums of Deep Purple, but you need some data source to tell you that ‘smoke on the water’ is that famous song from Deep Purple that everybody’s listening to.

It’s a scrobbling service. You send your listening data to it so that you can see your listening habits and share them with other people (your top songs, which countries the artists you listen to are from, etc.). It’s just interesting data that some people like to collect, but if you only throw on your mp3s and don’t care about that, then you probably won’t find much use in setting it up.

Edit: to clarify what “listening data” means here, it just means the metadata of the music you play. Song name, artist, album. Nothing fancy. I think it also supports marking songs as favorites.