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Thanksgiving is almost here, and I’ve already eaten half a bag of King’s Hawaiian rolls. I’m looking forward to signing off, seeing family, and eating a lot more bread later this week. But for now: podcasts. Or music, actually — most of this week’s news is about streaming music and what we listen to. And mostly, this week’s newsletter is about a service I have very fond memories of, even if I haven’t used it in many, many years.

Today, we’ve got a check-in on Last.fm and its burgeoning presence on Discord, an update on Neil Young on Spotify, a new audio editing tool from Anchor, and an expansion of Spotify’s audiobook efforts.

A quick heads-up for Insiders: we’re taking Thursday and Friday off this week for the holidays. Ariel will be back with you on Tuesday. See you then, and have a great holiday!

Last.fm turns 20 — and people are still scrobbling

Over the weekend, the service that popularized the practice of tracking your digital listening habits turned 20 years old. Last.fm’s users are still scrobbling — that is, tracking their music playback — hundreds of thousands of times a day, according to a running counter on the service’s website.

Last.fm felt just a little bit revolutionary when it was first introduced in the early 2000s. The site’s plug-ins — which were originally created for a different service called Audioscrobbler — tapped into your music player, took note of everything you listened to, and then displayed all kinds of statistics about your listening habits. Plus, it could recommend tracks and artists to you based on what other people with similar listening habits were interested in. “If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes,” the blogger Andy Baio wrote in February 2003 after first trying it out.

This was very much a precursor to the algorithmic recommendation systems that are built into every music streaming service today. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal — whatever it is you’re listening to, they’re all tracking your habits and using that to recommend new tracks to you. But on those services, your data is kept hidden behind the scenes. Using Last.fm was like having access to your year-end Spotify Wrapped but available