Last.fm vs ListenBrainz: Which Scrobbler Should You Use?

Last.fm and ListenBrainz both do the same basic job: they log every song you play and turn it into a searchable history. Past that, they are built on almost opposite philosophies. Last.fm is a commercial company with two decades of listening data and a large community. ListenBrainz is a free, open source project run by a nonprofit that publishes its data openly and has never charged for an account. Picking between them comes down to whether you value community and polish, or openness and permanence.

What Does Last.fm Actually Do?

Last.fm has been scrobbling since 2002, making it the original mainstream scrobbling service. It connects to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, SoundCloud, and most desktop and mobile players, then logs every track to your profile. From there it builds listening charts, artist and album stats, and social features like following other users and comparing musical taste.

In May 2026, Last.fm split off from Paramount Skydance and became an independent company again, which the team has framed as a return to a more scrobbling focused product after years under corporate media ownership.

What Is ListenBrainz?

ListenBrainz is the scrobbling project run by the MetaBrainz Foundation, the nonprofit behind MusicBrainz, the open music metadata database. It does the same core job as Last.fm: it logs what you play from Spotify, Apple Music, and most major players, then shows your history, stats, and listening charts. The difference is what happens to the data afterward. ListenBrainz publishes anonymised listening data as open data under a CC0 license, and the entire platform, front end, back end, and recommendation code, is open source on GitHub.

Is Last.fm Still Free to Use?

Mostly, yes, but it is worth knowing what changed recently. Scrobbling itself, your core listening history, is still free everywhere. What has moved behind a paywall is Last.fm Radio, the built-in streaming feature, which is now a subscription add-on in the US, UK, and Germany and has been withdrawn in most other countries. Last.fm Pro, a separate paid tier priced at roughly $4.99 a month, adds the ability to edit or delete individual scrobbles, change your username, and get early access to new features, none of which are available on a free account.

How Do Last.fm and ListenBrainz Handle Your Data?

Last.fm keeps your scrobbles on its own platform under its standard terms, and your listening history is public by default, visible to anyone who looks up your profile. There is no option to make your account fully private on the free tier.

ListenBrainz takes a different approach. Signing in means MetaBrainz can include your listens in public data dumps released under CC0, but your private profile information is excluded, and the project has been explicit that safeguarding that data indefinitely, not selling access to it, is the goal. Because the code is open source, anyone can check exactly what the server does with a submitted listen rather than taking a privacy policy on trust.

Last.fm vs ListenBrainz: The Comparison Table

Which One Should You Pick?

• Choose Last.fm if: you want the biggest scrobbling community, decades of chart history, and don't mind paying for radio or scrobble edits.
• Choose ListenBrainz if: you want a scrobbler that stays free and open indefinitely, with data you can inspect or export yourself.
• Choose neither if: you don't want your listening history to leave your computer at all.

If you care about the social side of scrobbling, comparing taste with friends, following other users, browsing decades of aggregated chart data, Last.fm's larger community is a real advantage that ListenBrainz cannot match yet. Just go in aware that editing mistakes and the radio feature now cost money in most places.

If you want a scrobbler that will never introduce a paywall and publishes exactly how it works, ListenBrainz is the more durable choice. It is missing some of Last.fm's social polish, but its recommendation features, the Weekly Jams and Weekly Exploration playlists built on its open source Troi engine, cover similar ground to Last.fm's own suggestions. Many people run both at once using a tool that scrobbles to both services simultaneously, which sidesteps the choice entirely.

A Third Option: Keeping Your History Off Both Services Entirely

Last.fm and ListenBrainz both work by submitting what you play to an external server, whether that is a for-profit company or a nonprofit foundation. For some people that tradeoff is fine. For others, the point of tracking their own listening is personal curiosity, not building a public profile or contributing to someone else's dataset.

Echo is built for that second group. It is a native Mac app that records what you play across Spotify, Apple Music, Podcasts, YouTube, and general browser audio and video, and keeps the entire history on your Mac. There is no account, no server, and nothing submitted to Last.fm, ListenBrainz, or any other service. Echo does not scrobble and it does not integrate with either platform; it is not trying to replace them. It is a private, searchable record of what you watched and listened to, with a keyboard shortcut, Command-Shift-E, to jump back to whatever you were playing.

If what you actually want is your own memory of what you played, not a public profile or an open dataset, that is a genuinely different job than either scrobbler is built for.