Friends Who Listen Alternatives: Live Listening vs Catching What You Missed

What Friends Who Listen actually did

Old Last.fm had a panel on artist and track pages: Friends who listen to X, with the people you follow who had played it. The redesign removed it. David Pavlík's extension put it back, for Chrome and Firefox, using the official Last.fm API with an optional cache so your friend list didn't have to be re-fetched on every page. That is the whole feature — a "which of my people play this?" widget, not a live feed and not a recommendation engine. The source is on GitHub if you want to run or revive it yourself.

The two jobs people conflate

"Friend-aware Last.fm" hides two wants that pull in opposite directions:

• Presence. Who is listening right now, what the group is into this week, which of my friends play this artist. Real-time, or near it. The value is in the now.
• The gap. What my friends have heard that I still haven't. Not real-time at all — it is a backlog, and the value is in working through it.

Friends Who Listen served the first. Most people who miss it want some of both, which is why one replacement never feels complete. The two tools below each take one job seriously.

Side by side

Option A: lastfmfriends.live — the live grid

lastfmfriends.live is the presence tool done properly. Type a username and you get a grid of everyone you follow, blocks updating in the background with whoever is playing something sorted to the top: track, artist, album art, a marker for loved tracks. Around it sit weekly charts across your whole friend group, a who listens panel that lists every friend who has played a given artist or track — the original extension's job, answered from a different angle — a scatter-plot of every play by day and hour, and a network graph of people to their most-played artists. It runs entirely in your browser, needs no account, and the code is public.

Where it stops is where every dashboard stops: it is a view, not a to-do list. It has no idea which of those tracks you have already heard, it doesn't remember what caught your eye yesterday, and the only thing you can do with a track is look at it. If what you wanted from Friends Who Listen was the feeling of a shared room, this is the room.

Option B: Whohears — the Dex

Whohears takes the other job. A public Last.fm username in, and it reads the people you follow, takes the tracks they play, and keeps only the ones you have never played. Those come back as a Dex: a numbered wall of cards, each greyed out until you catch it, each naming the friend it came from.

Catching is listening. Press Play and the cards come one at a time, full screen, already playing a 30-second preview; five seconds in, the card turns to colour and keeps its number for good. Swipe up for the next. Rarity is the artist's global listener count — Common down to Legendary — rarer catches pay more XP, and three new cards drop every day. It is on the web and as an iPhone app, one Dex per username between them.

What it doesn't do, to be equally plain: it does not show now-playing, it does not chart your group, and it is not a scrobbler — it reads the public API and never writes to your profile. If you open it hoping to see who is online, you will be disappointed in about four seconds.

Adjacent, and worth knowing

• Last.fm itself. Your friends page still lists what each person played last, and the Neighbours page still surfaces listeners with similar taste. Slow to scan, but zero setup.
• Finding people to follow. Both tools above are only as good as your friend list. Our compatibility checker rates any two public usernames, weighting shared artists by rarity; it is how to decide whether someone from a Reddit thread is worth following.
• Roll your own. The gap job is simple enough that people script it — one 2024 blog post describes a Perl script that reports "the music your friends have been listening to, but that you've never logged a play for." That is the Dex without the cards. If you like a terminal, it is a fine afternoon.

Which one

If you miss the room — seeing who is around and what the group is on — use the live grid; it is better at that than the original extension ever was. If you miss the leads — the artist a friend played forty times that you never got to — build a Dex. Plenty of people will keep a lastfmfriends.live tab open and catch cards on their phone. They are not competing for the same minute of your day.

Questions people ask