Recovering my scrobbles
On 27 November 2005 I scrobbled "Deadline - What you think" at 1.38 AM, next in line came Thyrfing, the Misfits and Skinless. It might seem a strange combination of music, but not for me.
I listened to music until 2:19 AM, closing the session with Dissection. On the following day, I woke up and started the day with the Ramones, at 10:00.
I know this because I just recovered my Last.fm profile. Truth is, I never lost it to be honest, I just stopped using it. Because, reasons.
Last.fm is, as I hope all of you know, a music service where you can track your listening habits, find new bands and styles and meet people who listen to the same music as you. The webpage was huge during the early 2000s.
I started using the service back at Uni and I jumped at the opportunity to showcase my superior musical taste to the rest of the world. Fact is, that I enjoyed it that much that I even joined the company working as a data engineer for some years. The company was based in London and I moved there. It was an interesting time in my life. Fond memories.
I kept listening to music and scrobbling, all was great and I loved my charts and my lists. And then, one day I stopped caring. I really don't know why exactly, I guess it's a combination of things: the webpage was dormant, I was not getting that "thrill" anymore, all my friends stopped using the webpage and nearly all my colleagues left the company.
Then, suddenly, I had kids. And then, suddenly (again), those kids started listening to (absolutely terrible) music. They were using my devices, so my scrobbles, something that I once kept sacred, got ... polluted. The worse was that I did not care much at the time. Shame on me.
Some days ago though, I saw in Hacker News that Last.fm became independent from the corporate overlords who wanted to dismantle it. Some folks kept the company and continued running it. Well, that's a change of plans. Surely I can "reboot" my profile again. But alas, it was a mess.
I had a tour over the page. It's not exactly what I remembered. Back in the day, when I participated in building the service, Last.fm had tons and tons of pages and sections. Now it's much simpler, but anyway, there was my profile (with my kids contributions), but still, my profile.
So I decided that I would reclaim and clean it from all the Trap and Hip Hop and Reggaeton and stuff. Let's go.
I started having a look at the disaster; tons of crap to delete, definitely not doable "manually". Let me code a script then.
Basically there are two problems:
- Finding the stuff you want to delete amid all the proper bands.
- Actually delete it.
First one is fun, second one not so much.
I coded a Python script that uses the Last.fm API to list all your scrobbles, then it's just a matter of blacklisting crap and whitelisting your bands. The result is the list of bands that you need to delete. Unfortunately there is no way to delete the scrobbles via API. I guess it would be a dangerous operation, it should exist, it doesn't though.
The only proper way of doing this is by writing the full deletion URL in a file. For each band then you need to click on it (doh!), look for the tiny delete icon in the webpage (doh!), click it (doh!) and then, click again to confirm that you want to delete those scrobbles (doh!).
Script is here if anybody needs it:
lant