Audioscrobbler

Audioscrobbler and Last.fm (2002–2006)

Audioscrobbler began as a computer science project by Richard Jones while he was attending the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science in the United Kingdom. The website was originally developed as two separate sources: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler, that later merged in 2005. The term scrobbling is defined as the process of finding, processing, and distributing information related to people, music, and other data. Jones developed the first plugins and opened an API to the community, which led to support for many music players across different operating system platforms. Audioscrobbler was initially limited to tracking which songs its users played on registered computers, enabling charting and collaborative filtering.