Like many music enthusiasts with a sense of responsibility, I approach Spotify with a certain degree of reluctance. In my professional life, I need access to a vast array of music; for leisure, I desire the same. Buying all that music would leave me with empty pockets, so I turn to Spotify. However, I can't help but resent its financial distribution model towards artists. My monthly £11.99 doesn't go directly to the musicians I actually listen to; instead, it's proportionally related to their popularity across the platform. This means that Ed Sheeran gets a significantly larger share of my money than Mabe Fratti. Moreover, Spotify hosts music that may very well be created by fake artists or AI. Playlists often take precedence over albums, and there was the whole Joe Rogan incident that led Joni Mitchell and Neil Young to leave the platform for a year.

Spotify Wrapped: A Double-Edged Sword

Perhaps surprisingly, I have less animosity towards Spotify Wrapped. This annual packaging of a user's listening habits features silly made-up genre names (like "pink Pilates princess strut pop?") and flattering stats about being in the top 0.5% of a particular artist's listeners. It undeniably presents a neat conclusion to Spotify's poor artist remuneration and big-tech encroachment. It's essentially a massive marketing push that users carry out for free. But this year, the main complaint is the company's blatant use of AI. As critic Brady Brickner-Wood wrote in a New Yorker comment piece titled "The hollow allure of Spotify Wrapped", if we can't trust the apps to tell us a meaningful story about our art consumption, how can we ever discover the unique aspects of our inner lives?

Trusting the Platforms with Our Inner Lives

When it comes to deeply caring about music, are we really entrusting the idiosyncratic composition of our inner lives to these platforms? It seems like a foolish endeavor. A tech company that has hijacked music consumption for profit and only cares about our taste as long as it can harvest our consumer profiles for profit. But I understand the desire for a quick overview of our music taste. And that's where last.fm comes in. It's a data-focused archive of our listening habits.I started using last.fm on 22 April 2007, recording the music I played across Apple Music and Spotify (though I reset it in late 2011, perhaps embarrassed by my younger taste). With its calendar setting, we can look at our artist/track/album charts from various time periods, allowing us to remember who we were in a specific month or year. For example, in July 2015, I was a huge Julia Holter fan. Last.fm was founded in 2002 and now offers a reduced service compared to its early days, but it still provides a useful and straightforward list of our music history. When Guardian writers vote for their albums of the year, last.fm is the first place I look to understand the sound of a particular year.

The Social Aspect of Last.fm

As a teenager going to university to study French and German, I used last.fm's "recommended radio" function to discover music from those countries. I found an all-time favorite in the late French punk Lizzy Mercier Descloux. Before even arriving at the University of Bristol, I joined its last.fm group and befriended someone with great taste. We ended up living together and exploring the city's gig scene. Years later, when I went to Chicago, I met one of their last.fm friends and we still exchange Christmas cards.Last.fm also played a role in my love life. In my late teens, I flirted with my then-crush on its messaging function while getting excited about the new bands we were going to see at my first ATP festival. When a dating service based on the last.fm API was accurate in matching me with some of my top choices, it was quite remarkable. This summer, I started seeing someone who is also a dedicated last.fm user. Adding each other as friends on the site added a touch of novelty. Even though we already felt a connection, seeing my favorite music reflected in his stats was charming.

Last.fm as a Motivator

Last.fm can be a great source of motivation. A friend told me that as he gets older, the statistics encourage him to listen like he did when he was younger. It shows when a musician goes from a casual listen to a full-fledged favorite. I only discovered Clarissa Connelly a couple of months ago, but she has quickly become one of my top five most-played artists this year. The data is one thing, but the memories associated with listening to her with my last.fm friend are what truly matter. Similarly, Death Cab for Cutie returned to my top three for the first time since my teens, ahead of seeing them in London.But whether it's Spotify Wrapped or last.fm, the numbers are only a prompt to remember who we were during a particular time. We can't rely on streaming platforms to tell us a meaningful story about our art consumption. (For a great read on what streaming platforms have done to our consumption, read critic and reporter Liz Pelly's new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.)

Breaking Free from the Algorithm

Worst of all, some listeners seem defeated by the idea that "the algorithm" (a concept that critic Max Read debunks well) is making them boring. We should break free! Set our own listening seasons and projects; start a music group chat with friends and share recommendations. Taste isn't just about what the machine feeds us or how many times we listen to an artist; it's about the experiences we have, the relationships we form, and the color it adds to our lives. In my opinion, last.fm still reigns supreme, but when it comes to taste, the final say should be ours.