Hello, this might be a little weird, but I recently noticed the Global button looking at statistics, and have been fascinated by it.
I am finding it interesting and a little surprising looking at the data. Like how massively it initially jumped (making sense for the first year or 2) then fairly stable until 2016 where it started having much bigger jumps, and beyond 2025 seems bigger even beyond that? I guess just a little shocked how quickly it jumped and curiosity at factors.
Just find this really cool looking at songs too seeing what I would expect, not, and now wanting to dig more in historical too. (some personal usage, some just fun to see) And wondering if anyone has the memory or records indicating for these big jumps. (Did you know before checking that we aren’t even through the first month of the year yet, and already close to double the listens tracked in the first year (2005 (and again, It was probably not the whole year tracked, but still))
Yes, the beta version of 2017 added file imports and more Last.FM compatible options, as well as announcing that:
We don’t plan to reset the database from here on out — this is the real deal and we plan to safeguard and make this database available as soon as we can. If you have hesitated with sending your listen histories to ListenBrainz in the past, you should now feel free to send your listen information to us!
And it’s been on a steady climb since
At the time, the website was very limited, with just a page of listens and some very limited statistics. No cover art, no interactions (not even simply loving a track), no listening to music, nothing else than the bare minimum.
We’ve come a long way since and have improved every single aspect, and I think our users were able to see that and recommend it.
In the past couple of years, after a significant redesign in 2023, we’ve made a more significant push to publicise our regular improvements, doing more outreach on social media, fixing a lot of the sticking points and helping less technically-minded users get on board.
We’re seeing the result of that now, and word of mouth is spreading steadily.
I forgot to mention that we’ve also expanded the team over time, with more of us spending more of our time working on improving LB.
We are now 6 in the team that work on and off on LB, along with other MetaBrainz projects.
This is what that looks like in practice, code-wise:
!