I read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka last year and have been trying to be more mindful of where algorithms are influencing my consumption. Music is probably the biggest portion of that consumption. For the last 10 years or so I have largley moved away from listening to albums or making specific playlists and just relying on generated “stations” in YouTube Music. Part of this is due to the fact that all of my friend group uses Spotify so I can’t connect and share with them as easily for recommendations. The other part is it’s just easier when I’m working or commuting to just click a single button and zone out to an endless, themed playlist.

I decided I want to be more intentional about what I’m listening to and ways I can discover new music. My first step was trying to see what I was actually listening to. Unfortunately there’s really no way to view a summary of artists/albums/songs on YouTube Music. You just get a history list and some “recently played” options on the home page. So I started looking back into “scrobbling” which was a feature of lastfm that lets you send all of your listens to them so they can process it and give you statistics and recommendations.

After logging back into my lastfm account (which had it’s last scrobbled track in 2013) I was a little dissapointed with how commercialized it had become. Lots of ads and pushing a “plus” subscription to unlock more features. Did some more digging and it turns out there are some other services that support “scrobbling” that are free and even open source and self-hosted. The first one I settled on was Koito which is a self-hosted and very simple app that shows just a summary of what you’ve listened to and metrics for artist/album/song. The other one I like is called Listenbrainz which has a strong ethos of openness as well as a wider range of features including weekly recommendation playlists that are not generated by AI or have any influence from record labels or anyone else with financial incetives.

Now I needed to figure out how to get my YouTube Music plays to start scrobbling to these services. For that I found a great tool called multi scrobbler that let me configure YouTube Music as a source and as many upstreams to send data to. It was incredibly easy to set up and I was able to get my plays sending to both my Koito instance and Listenbrainz. It was so easy I also went ahead and set up a connection to my Lastfm account so it’s now getting new listens too.

After a full week of listens both Listenbrainz and Lastfm have started providing recommendations. Listenbrainz allows for exporting their weekly recommendation playlist as a JSPF formatted file which is an open standard but there is no native support for importing it into YouTube Music. So I’m currently looking for a tool to do that so I can easily transfer that over each week.

It feels good to take more control of this process and be more intentional with what I’m consuming. I’ve already gone back and listened to some albums that used to be frequent listens for me but had fallen deep into listening history and not surfaced by any of the algorithms serving me recommendations.