In the age of the Internet, technology is constantly changing - some are replacing others. One of the relatively recent phenomena has been scrobbling music on the Internet. But few people reliably know exactly how it works. Scrobbling - what is it?
In this article we will tell you what kind of technology it is, why it is needed and why it is becoming more and more popular today.
History of creation
This term first appeared about 10 years ago on one of the most famous music portals Last.fm. In fact, scrobbling is a method of collecting statistics about your listening to music. Initially, he thought in order to collect the necessary information on the server in order to control the listening of various musical artists.
Technology and working methods
Scrobbling technology - safe collection and sorting of information about listening to songs. The algorithms are assembled in such a way that the listener only needs to use the player with such a built-in function, all information is processed automatically. This method of conducting statistics has developed, like any other technology, and over time, the main advantages and disadvantages of this method have been identified.
Benefits
The advantages are that when collecting information:
1. The listening data is summarized and added to the real listening statistics of this or that musician. The more music the artist listened to by the general flow of people, the more he is popular all over the world. Such statistics are convenient for both the listener and the performer. The artist sees how famous he is, and the listener can observe a growing trend in the popularity of artists and thereby choose for themselves really high-quality music.
2. Scrobbling is something like a database, it allows the user to openly see statistics of any other user. So you can learn about the tastes and preferences of any other person.
3. By collecting information, sites with the function of collecting statistics can select music for you, similar to the one that you have already listened to. Thus, the system can gather for you little-known groups, just starting to release music in the genre, which you prefer. Without this function, alas, little-known projects are very difficult to find.
4. Scrobbling of Last.fm and other similar sites works both locally and around the world. Actually, the listening statistics you see on Last.fm is the totality of all the listening on this site from anywhere in the world.
5. Scrobbling allows the user to know how many times he has listened to the same song. Rather, it's just a chip, however, you can sort your statistics by the number of times you listen to one song and enjoy your favorite tracks over and over again.
disadvantages
1. Last.fm owns a scrobbling patent. You can’t just create a website with such a program without mutual agreement with representatives of this portal. Nevertheless, some eminent resources managed to establish friendship with the Last.fm leadership, and today we can use the scrobbling function on Yandex.Music, for example.
2. The process of collecting information alone does not inspire confidence among some listeners and performers. Nobody canceled bots and cheat systems for listening to performers. The Last.fm portal assures that it is fighting against ill-wishers and pests.
3. By adopting a policy of collecting statistics, you open access to personal information, namely to the number of your personal auditions. That is, you actually give access to what kind of music you listened to and at what time. Many people prefer to remain inconspicuous even in matters such as the choice of music, and they can be understood.
4. Many people believe that scrobbling is just a mechanism to impose certain paid performers. As mentioned above, players with this feature have the function of selecting artists for a particular user. Indeed, this could be used to impose specific projects in individual genres, popularizing them. But then again, the only thing that remains for us to do is trust the honest Last.fm owners.
Scrobbling player on mobile devices
Since this technology is a convenient feature for many listeners, today there are many players with scrobbling on Android and IOS.
Last.fm offers its own mobile player with listening data processing. It is quite convenient and has the function of caching the already listened composition. This allows you to listen to music in places inaccessible to the network, such as the subway.
Reviews of the player with scrobbling on Android from Last.fm show the incredible usability of it. And today, about a million people use it.
There are also several players independent from Last.fm and Yandex.Music with the function of calculating and collecting statistics. For example, the Shuttle player can be used both with the Last.fm profile connected (and sending srobbling data to their servers), and without it. In this case, local statistics are created. It is logical to assume that when you delete a local profile, all statistics are also deleted.
Prospect of use
Many people think that scrobbling is a system that can only be used with respect to music. However, today Steam uses this function in relation to computer games. Book sites also use a collection of information about readings of books by individual authors.
The prospect of using scrobbling is reaching a new level, and at the same time, new methods of collecting statistics are being developed.
Use new technologies to facilitate your search for new musicians and artists!