Due to the news that last.fm may have given the RIAA user data, I’ve thrown together a Ruby script that will dump out a user’s listening history. Having exported my own data, I’m now free to cancel my last.fm account while keeping my play logs. Of course, if you’re not interested in jettisoning your last.fm account, this still serves as a convenient backup method.
This is no major loss to me, as I’ve been scrobbling solely from my phone for the past eight months or so, which turns out to be a very haphazard process — there’s no guarantee that anything will scrobble, or that all the tracks will scrobble. Even beyond that, I’ve only ever used the service for a personal music history. So even though I’m removing the possibility of my play history being recorded, in practice not much is changing.
