If you wondered what Last.fm’s mobile strategy might be now that it’s all but killing off its Radio service, here you go – a brand new iOS app, Last.fm Scrobbler is now available that brings the power of all that listening data the company has amassed to the music you have on your device already.
Essentially designed as an alternative to Apple’s stock Music app, it offers plenty of additional features to enhance the experience, including artist bios and tour dates, smart playlists and recommendations for similar tracks to the one you’re currently playing, helping you to rediscover hidden gems in your collection.
It supports any songs you have stored on iCloud too, so if like me you have your entire music collection on Apple’s servers, it can be a really useful way of digging back into all that music you may not have listed to in a long time, by way of the recommendations it provides.
The main benefit for Last.fm here is that it means people can easily ‘scrobble’ data about plays from their iOS devices’ music libraries for the first time. Scrobbling from an iPhone has always been easy when using third-party apps like Spotify, but due to the way apps are sandboxed in iOS, scrobbling plays of local files in the Music app required syncing your device with your computer and praying that the Last.fm app there picked up the plays as they synced with iTunes – it rarely worked correctly.
Additionally, there’s monetization in the form of recommended music to buy from iTunes, which Last.fm will get a referral fee for when users act on them.
If you’re a dedicated Last.fm user, Scrobbler is a no-brainer to install and use on a daily basis as a replacement for Apple’s own app. It’s a surprise they didn’t release it a long time ago.
Image credit: Chad Baker / Thinkstock
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