I find it slightly bizarre how popular Last.fm has become over time. I understand that the service now offers a plethora of features, including some powerful music discovery tools, yet at the core Last.fm is just an overly detailed extension of the play count found in every media player since Windows XP. It tracks what music you listen to; that's it, the whole of their USP.
To be clear, I may find it bizarre but I am not surprised at the service's popularity. Personally, I love Last.fm and thoroughly enjoy digging into my monthly/annual listening habits, seeking out new artists or rediscovering ones I had forgotten. It's continued popularity proves that I am not alone and that, bells and whistles aside, being able to analyse your musical tastes and use them to inform future experiences is something that a decent number of people see value in.
So I find it all the more irritating that there doesn't appear to be a similar service available for film/TV. There are services like Letterboxd that let me manually track what I watch, but I already do that. There's nothing extra on offer and they are particularly lacking a visual media analogue to scrobbling. When they launched, scrobbling was a seriously weird idea, but it solved the single largest issue that Last.fm had: apathy. When I'm listening to music, I don't want to have to pause every few minutes, break out of 'the zone' and write down what I've just heard. No, Last.fm had to find a way to make the data gathering automatic, ensuring their datasets are as complete as possible.
With movies and TV there are further obstacles, chiefly that the methods of consumption are not quite so intricately linked with the internet or computers in general. But with the rise and rise of streaming services such as Netflix combined with the increasing trend of buying media digitally should result in these roadblocks slowly eroding away. Hopefully, soon, someone will pop up to start taking advantage of that process.
In the meantime, I'm going to continue looking for options and pondering my own. I would love to be able to put something together here, just a quick notes section that I could easily type up and submit to directly from my phone. Perhaps I could get it running, but in reality it will likely remain as a Todoist task for months. We'll just have to wait and see.
