Last.fm, will it start fresh?

It will start fresh, unless they’ve changed it since I used it. Which was admittedly quite some time ago.

Yeah, it will, which is silly, but you know.

It does not import playcounts from your media player, if that’s what you’re asking. It starts its own count.

That’s sad. Thank you.

It ask if you want to import your play count. At least if you’re using iTunes. I don’t know why everyone else says otherwise. Just look at this guy, he joined some weeks ago, and he sure haven’t listened to all those songs.

Umm..
1) It keeps track of how many plays since the day you joined.
2) It syncs plays from your iTunes library.
3) When you sync your iPod to iTunes it counts those too.

Sorry if I totally misunderstood the question.

They actually go to great lengths to avoid people gaming the system. I could alter iTunes to make it look like I listened to Nickleback a billion times. They try to avoid that. So it doesn’t import anything that wasn’t from a last.fm app. This is reasonable.

And the guy linked to above probably found a hole and is exploiting it.

When I joined, it imported all my past plays. I started out with 2500 plays because is synced with all of the recorded plays in my iTunes.

No, No, NO!. it’s a friend of me and i know this. I have other friends that did the same.
I’m talking to another friend now, and he also says it imported his tracks. This will only work the first time you scrobble. You should know that this is something that came half a year ago or so tho.

@wilhel
I said otherwise because I’ve been using it since April of 2004, and I didn’t think they would ever implement that since it would make it really easy to game the system. I should have checked before answering, though. Thanks for pointing out the new (well, relatively new) feature.

In an excellent example of why I thought they would never implement such a feature, wilhel’s friend has 25,000 more plays than I do, despite having joined only two and a half weeks ago, when I joined something like 52 months ago.

Who cares about the number of plays? It will allways be possible to trick the system by leaving on the music 24/7 and play only 1 minute songs. That’s 1440 songs per day. I think it’s great that they let new users import they library if they want to. That way, they won’t have to wait a year for the system to start working.

Ehm, it’s easy to game the system. Just tag one-second-duration songs with a certain tag or tag all your songs with the same tags, and your done. But where’s the fun in that? What I like best about Last.fm is seeing which music I’m listening, and using third-party tools like LastGraph to view my history or music style.

Also, I seem to recall that it also scrobbled my play history when I started using it (I believe that was 2005).

I’m not saying it’s a bad feature. I’m just saying that I know they do have measures in place to prevent gaming of the system. I don’t think the problem is as big as it used to be when they had leaderboards and whatnot. Now the main concern would be people who wanted to be listed as a number one fan of a certain group. It’s not that it’s the end of the world or anything, it’s just annoying for people to do that.

And yes, it would be possible to game the system even without playcount importing available. However, it becomes much easier when playcounts are imported. In the space of about four seconds, I could use an AppleScript (one that I already have) to say that I had listened to every song in my library 100,000 times. I could then create a new Lsat.fm account that started with almost 500,000,000 listens. Granted, the information would be useless to me—but it would still mess up Last.fm’s charts quite a bit. (Maybe they have a cap, but where?)

All I really do is look at my stats and my friends stats, so what I’m saying isn’t coming from any particular personal concern.

Side note: Plays under 30 seconds aren’t scrobbled (at least, not after an account is created).

@aidje – it wouldn’t mess up the charts. In public charts, even if you listen it 500,000,000 times, only one is counted. It’s only your personal charts that get messed up.

Oh, though you might be listed as “Top listener” for a certain track, but well…