Last.fm overview
Understand what the Last.fm system does, which tier each feature needs, and which guide to read next.
Righteous reads your Last.fm account and turns it into now-playing cards, collages, server
leaderboards, crowns and long-range listening stats. Nearly all of it lives under one command with
subcommands: ,lastfm, aliased ,lf, mirrored on slash as
/lastfm.
Nothing here works until you link an account. Everything after that splits into four jobs, and this page is the map.
Link an account first
Run ,lastfm set <username> with your Last.fm username, not
your email. The account needs at least one scrobble on it. Linking also pulls your top artists,
albums and tracks into the bot so play counts answer instantly.
The full walkthrough, including the now-playing card and every way to customise it, is in Setup and now playing.
Pick the job you came for
| You want to | Read |
|---|---|
| Link an account, show what you're playing, restyle the card | Setup and now playing |
| See who else in the server listens to an artist, and who holds the crown | WhoKnows and crowns |
| Build a cover collage, or read your top artists, genres, countries and listening clock | Charts and stats |
| Sync your whole scrobble history, ask date questions, download a CSV | History, sync and export |
Know which of three data sources answers your question
Commands here don't all read the same thing, and that explains most of the surprising behaviour.
Last.fm, live. ,lastfm np and
,lastfm recent ask Last.fm what's happening right now.
Nothing is stored, so nothing goes stale.
Your stored library. Your top artists, albums and tracks, written when you link and refreshed by
,lastfm update. Play counts, WhoKnows and crowns all read
this, which is why they're instant and why they can lag behind reality until a refresh.
Your synced scrobble history. A local copy of every individual play, with timestamps, built by
,lastfm update history. Last.fm's own API can't answer "what did I play in June 2023", so
everything date-shaped needs this. It's a Self Premium feature and it's covered in
History, sync and export.
Why a command sometimes says it has nothing to work with
A stats command that needs synced history and doesn't find any will either fall back to all time and say so, or refuse outright. It refuses when there's no honest fallback — there's no all-time answer to "what did I play on this date".
Check the tier before you promise someone a feature
Three tiers exist and they are three separate products, not three levels of one.
| Tier | Costs | How you get it |
|---|---|---|
| Boosting Premium | Free | Boost the support server |
| Self Premium | Paid | Covers your account, in every server |
| Server Premium | Paid | Covers one whole server, for everyone in it |
Free and paid are easy to confuse here
Boosting Premium costs nothing. Self Premium and Server Premium are purchases. A feature marked Boosting Premium below is available to any booster without paying anything. See /premium for the current pricing and the full non-Last.fm breakdown.
What each tier unlocks in this section
Everything not listed below is free once you've linked an account.
Boosting Premium — taste,
genres,
country,
obscurity,
decades,
artisttype,
clock,
timezone,
lyrics,
playing and
topalbumsongs.
Self Premium — the whole history family
(update history,
first,
last,
timeline,
milestone,
pace,
year,
onthisday,
discoveries,
gaps,
movers,
export) plus the personal display settings
(color,
mode,
react,
customcommand,
autoupdate).
Server Premium — crownindex, the server-wide
now-playing defaults and crown controls under
,lastfm server, and weekly or daily cadence on the
server digest.
Either paid tier — timestamps on
,lastfm recent needs Self Premium or Server Premium in the server you run it in.
Boosting Premium or Server Premium — the Customize button under a chart, the full WhoKnows list
past the first page, and a longer ,lastfm recent list.
Two things every server admin should know
Server-wide Last.fm settings live under
,lastfm server and need Manage Server. Most of them
are Server Premium, with two deliberate exceptions: the WhoKnows blacklist and a monthly digest are
free.
A member's own paid settings always beat the server default. A server that sets a now-playing style is setting it for members who haven't bought their own, not overriding the ones who have.