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from Lastfm advising me of gigs?

The songkick app on spotify ruins me, went to so many gigs last year as it emails you gig announcement for bands you are listening to, never used the website just browsed through the spotify app

to be honest i'd forgotten i had lastfm, only realised last week its been plugged into my spotify account for the last couple of years scrobbling which is cool

I use Ents24 for alerts. Nothing better than getting a "Your favourite band just announced a date in the city you live in, motherfucker" email in your inbox!

there's so much potential there but it seems as if the developers have abandoned it entirely. The new scrobbler upgrade is terrible. Why they produced that after years of leaving well alone is bizarre. That's just the start.

based on my last.fm account

...I think?

SongKick send me an email telling me when folk are playing and that's just dandy.

For some reason I always found Last FM kind of depressing.

Seems to be working just the same as ever for me.

it just looks horrible. The list of scrobbles is spaced really widely instead of a neat compact list, and it doesn't even tell you all of them - probably because they've made the spacing far too big to ever fit it all into anything. Just stupid of them.

The desktop app thingy is all big pictures too. Why does everything have to look like an over-inflated cartoon? That's more personal preference though, I like things sleek and serious looking.

More social: make friends, see what they listen to. Post comments on event pages (good for face-value resale of tickets).
See your listening data, obviously. (I am approaching 100,000 plays!!!!!)
Use as a discovery tool for new music.

You can't do any of those on Spotify, so I find them both useful.

I meant "can't do those on Songkick", not "on Spotify". I agree, the 'similar artists' on Spotify is useful.

Should've realised that's what you meant in a thread about last.fm and songkick.

I like how it has everything I listened to on mp3 since around 2004 (and some teenagers presumably everything they have ever listened to ever), but I'd like to be able to break it down even more. Maybe top track played on a Friday night? Or top album played from a particular year? Otherwise I am just looking at who I listened to the most in the last x amount of time.

Is pretty alright actually. It has a little "On tour" notification there when you play a specific artist that you can click on and find out that they are playing one festival in the states or whatever and get somewhat disappointed!

So yeah, agree with general point, if you could customise it so that it only notified artists as "On tour" when they were in your country and so on it could be a heck of a lot more useful.

I still like it overall though, and some of its recommendations are winners (I discovered Lindstrom recently through them).

I know last.fm well.

Therefore I conclude Last.FM is still the more important service.

It hasn't been reliable for me for years, it actually annoys me quite a bit. Hope i have success with the new one

There's no way that's true.

I fail to believe that a music fan, from a music website, who also uses LastFM and Spotify, doesn't know what Songkick is.

I just don't know what it actually is.

I had ceased going to loads and loads of gigs a fair few years back.

I've only ever seen Last.FM as a tool for recording statistics about what I listen to.

since I've been driving to work instead of taking the train.

but in lieu of a thisismyjam app, i've been enjoying the last.fm recommended/neighbour radio thing lately.

soundcloud seemed to have detached itself from last.fm last time i logged in (didn't have a sync with last.fm option anymore, iirc), and the interface felt naff. but they send me emails of stuff that's on, which i add to my gig list in last.fm, which syncs to my google calendar, which is handy to have alongside my other calendar stuff on my phone.

one thing that should exist is a last.fm app for ps3 so i can scrobble my cd plays. i guess sony have their vidzone app thing and see it as competition. but i thought CBS were linked to/owned by sony?

Proprietary nonsense and rights squabbles are lame.

maybe I wasn't working it right

Wait. The fact that you don't like how the program looks is you're reason for it declining?

It seemed good when a huge list came up, but then over half were red and couldn't be selected. Why show them if they can't be read...I don't understand. Anyway, will remember my listening until tomorrow night and then test it again.

You can subscribe to them, but it's certainly not as slick or user-friendly as Songkick.

Or, if I can, then it's shit. Do you really have to either a) wade through all the hundreds of gigs happening in London every night, or b) go through and manually add every band you may be interested in seeing and then you still only get told about *them* and not other bands you may like? Last.fm gives me recommendations that actually interest me without me having to do anything myself.

should be able to automatically track your favourite last.fm artists, and/or most (all?) things in your music player. Although you might get a whole heap of bands you're not that fussed about.
I think that's how it works, although it's been a while since I set up an account, and now I just individually add new bands I come across.

Songkick used to be a lot better though - you could easily check other friends' gigs, see how many times you had seen a particular band or how many times you had been to a particular venue. For some reason they took away these options a while ago.

On the right hand of the home screen you can import all your iTunes artists, or last.fm, or Pandora or Spotify. You can also manually add or delete them.

but they have also got the shade of red wrong. I meant that it illustrates their inattentiveness to it. They could be doing a lot more, something like Steinbolt says below - being able to run more detailed stats would be fun. Like, what day of the week do I most frequently listen to artist X.

They could fix the Groups stats so they actually work.

Post to social media FB/Twitter/Tumblr when you love tracks.

Have more to the Friends Activities section; showing their recent comments, journal entries, events listings etc, no just what they're currently listening to or what they've loved. That could all be bumped onto social media sites too.

Things like that all seem quite basic now. It's a bit passive. they would get people using it more regularly or by feeding out to Facebook etc, get themselves involved more.

They've got some good bits. I've always liked how the tagging in journal entries works, posting them to the artist's pages. The events listings are good - debatable, as seen in the posts below, but I really like it. When I used to go out a lot that was my diary.

All that is why I think they're in decline, not just the aesthetics.

they have apps you can use that do some of the stuff I mentioned. But they should just have done it themselves!

It doesn't serve any purpose beyond gig alerts and it's a little bit clumsy. Not only that, but you do have to click on individual artists in order to receive concert alerts. The import of last.fm data just doesn't work anymore and hasn't done for months. Last.fm is far superior and recent changes have only served to benefit what is already an essential site/tool for music lovers.

i didn't realise, and suddenly found out the other week that loads of gigs by new bands I like had been announced, but songkick hadn't told me about them! It is really useful to get alerts about gigs though.

Just installed it and it's great for finding out about gigs. Awesome, thanks.

How they had all these great (if underdeveloped) features for finding out about upcoming gigs, and it really looked like they were going to become to only place I ever needed to look to find out about gigs I wanted to go to. Then one day all the useful features just disappeared and they added a blog post saying "we've removed them so we can rebuild from the ground up - they'll be back!". That was a year and a half ago.

Bought last.fm all they've been interested in is developing the radio services at the expense of the fantastic data metric system behind it. Since 2007 I've had a constant trouble with scrobbling correctly whilst they released one broken patch after another. This latest update is the nail in the coffin for me personally, won't scrobble anything properly now. So songkick you say?!