For the past few months we’ve been working on enabling ListenBrainz to record your Spotify listening history automatically and we’ve just now released this feature! If you would like ListenBrainz to record your Spotify listening history automatically (and make it public!), go here to link your Spotify account to ListenBrainz. We’ll take care of the rest!

We would like to encourage as many users as possible to record their listening histories in ListenBrainz. With the data we collect and safeguard for you, we will soon start building more music discovery features. Please help our mission and go connect your account now!

This release also adds two new pages: Recent listens and the “follow” page. The recent listens page shows the most recent listens that we’ve saved in ListenBrainz for any user. This is a convenient way for you to discover other users who are currently listening to music.

The follow page is the new feature that we’re really excited about — it allows you to listen to the music that other people are currently listening to — pick a number of users to follow and their recent listens will appear on the page. The new embedded Spotify player can start playing the music as the listens roll in. This allows you to follow your friends and learn about music that they love! We’re going to write another blog post that talks more about the follow page and how we plan to improve that going forward — stay tuned for that.

This release also re-organizes the menu layout a little, moving the most useful features so that they’re easily accessible. Behind the scenes we’ve upgraded to using Python 3.7, starting using some portions of React for our user interface and also found ourselves amazed that this release included 646 commits! We hope to go to a more regular schedule of releases from here on out — this was a big push for us with a lot of infrastructure improvements that were needed.

This release would not have been possible if Monkey (from BookBrainz) didn’t come and help us write the UI for the follow feature. Monkey, iliekcomputers and myself worked relentlessly for weeks trying to push out some exciting features that show off the first steps for what we have planned for ListenBrainz. We’re quite excited for this release and we hope that you’ll enjoy the follow page and discover new music!