Last.fm Integration Status and Plans for Restoration

Hey @djox 
Welcome to the Sonos Community!
This is an excellent question, that required stirring up some dust. The short answer is that I am currently unaware of plans to restore the last.fm integration.

However, I have taken your post and marked it as feature request to get shared with the relevant teams for their consideration.

This is a high priority feature for me too. 

Thanks 

Note that the majority of the work is on the Last.fm team. Sonos has written the API that all streaming companies use, it’s up to the streaming company to incorporate that API onto their music servers, so that the Sonos system can read the music, and show the associated data.

You may want to express your desires and concerns to the Last.fm folks as well.

Actually it's the opposite with last.fm. They're not really a streaming service. And yes, this has been raised on their forums. 

So, Last.fm is not a music service? I don’t use it myself, so I’m not particularly familiar with it.

I was unaware of any ‘work’ needing to be done by Sonos, other than writing the API and publishing it to the various music services, per the Sonos partners page. That way, they have to point to a server with their API on it, owned by each streamer, and not write a separate ‘system’ to connect to each of hundreds of services for each stream, something I’d think would quickly become onerous to maintain, given the frequency of changes made by all of the different streaming companies. 

Why does Sonos consider Last.fm to be ‘different’ than all other streams? 

It isn’t a music service, it collects data (scrobbles) of the songs you listen to. Users can then use the data to discover new music, create playlists etc. 

It’s unacceptable that while Sonos are very slowly adding features back to the app they have decided to just drop some features and is not able or is unwilling to do the work to put this back. There are sourced articles that say last.fm reached out to Sonos to offer help add scrobbling back. This has been a part of the Sonos system since like 2010 or maybe before.

Thanks for the update, really hoping this will get reintroduced. 

Last.fm is more like a music analytics platform that aggregates listening data across multiple streaming services and provides you with detailed statistics about your music listening - basically like having Spotify’s annual Wrapped feature whenever you want in form of weekly/monthly/yearly reports. So as EbayYellow already explained, you can use it to discover new music etc. but in my case, I really like having the option of analyzing my listening habits by having all data in one place.

The platform features direct integration with several streaming services, including Spotify and Deezer. However, some popular services have limitations - Apple Music requires manual scrobbling, while YouTube Music lacks native integration altogether. 

That’s where Last.fm’s previous integration with Sonos came in. It automatically tracked all music playback through Sonos speakers, regardless of the streaming service being used. This universal tracking capability provided a convenient workaround for services lacking direct Last.fm support. However, this functionality was removed with the recent app update and I believe many of us are looking forward to having it back. :)

Moved house last week and reset Sonos speaker on new Internet and very disappointed that this feature has now gone. It had kept working at my previous place even after app updates, so didn't realise it had been (yet another!) Sonos issue. "Can I connect to my last.fm account?" is basically the first question I ask when getting a new music product/service!

I was reading this thread from a couple of years ago on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/lastfm/comments/11k27bw/sonos_users_lastfm_sonos_scrobbling/

Someone mentioned connecting Spotify to their speaker via airplay rather than spotify connect - I did the same and the tracks I had been playing for the last couple of hours suddenly appeared on last.fm, when previously they hadn’t.

Until recently scrobbling to last.fm from Spotify when using Spotify connect with a Sonos speaker has been fine. The only thing I can think of which has changed is on last.fm I have turned on the Spotify Scrobbling connection. I’m sure it must be linked somehow,.

I’d also implore Sonos to reinstate Last.fm as a service via their app (the fact last.fm has to be explained to the Somos folks on here is not encouraging). I’ve had last.fm scrobbling what I play on apps phone web since 2005. The Guardian wrote a piece on Last.fm recently and its unique offering. https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2024/dec/11/music-tells-the-story-of-our-lives-and-trusty-old-lastfm-does-it-better-than-gaudy-spotify-wrapped  Worth a read.