I remember when Twitter was still quite new. Back then, a lot of people were still trying to think of uses for it and one thing that was fairly common was to plug it into your Last.fm account.
In retrospect I can see why that was seen as a good idea. Twitter was supposed to be about broadcasting minor ephemeral details, and the music you were currently listening to definitely fell into that category. But there was a downside. People listen to a lot of music and, with a Twitter post for each track played, that added up to a lot of useless information on Twitter. Thankfully, the practise of scrobbling directly to Twitter soon faded out.
Today there are some more useful and less irritating ways of posting information from Last.fm (or, indeed, its open source alternative Libre.fm to your Twitter account. One of them, Tweekly.fm, produces an automated weekly tweet of your top three artists. Another one, which I’m going to explain here, involves posting tracks that you “love” on Last.fm to your Twitter account.
Here’s how it works:
- If you don’t have a Last.f account, create one here
- Get the URL of your “Loved tracks” RSS feed. This is easy: just change “USERNAME” in the URL below for your Last.fm username.
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/USERNAME/lovedtracks.rss
- Test the URL by opening it in a browser. You should see something that looks a bit like this:
- If it works, go to Twitterfeed.com and create an account if necessary
- Once logged in to Twitterfeed, click on the “Create new feed” button to the top-right of the screen
- In “Step 1: Send Feed To”, select Twitter. Click on the large “Authenticate Twitter” button and enter your Twitter account details. You’ll then be directed back to Twitterfeed.com
- In “Step 2: Name feed & source URL”, enter a name for the feed – this can be anything you like. In the “RSS Feed URL” field, paste the URL of your RSS feed
- Click on the “test feed” button to make sure the feed is valid
- Click “Advanced settings”. A bunch of new options will appear underneath. Here’s a screenshot with the things you need to check circled in red:
- In “Post content”, select “Title Only”. This will ensure that the posts to your Twitter account only contain the artist, title and shortened URL to the track you loved
- Make sure “Post link” is checked and a URL shortening service is selected
- You might also want to enter some text in the “Post Prefix” or “Post Suffix” fields, otherwise your tweets might be slightly baffling
- You’re done – just click “Create feed” and that’s it set up.
Now whenever you “love” a track on Last.fm, your Twitter account will post a link to it. This makes Last.fm’s “love” feature a bit more useful when it comes to recommending music to other people – especially people who don’t use Last.fm. And as long as you don’t love everything you listen to you won’t be clogging up your Twitter feed.
Very useful article! Actually I was thinking of writing this method to my blog. I am a very lazy blogger, however :/
Very useful, thanks! Used to use lastfmlovetweet (or something) however have been having problems with it lately so I’m happy to have found something that’s easy to customise and works perfectly. Awesome guide.
When I originally commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time
a comment is added I get four emails with the
same comment. Is there any way you can remove people from that service?
Many thanks!
Thanks! the same of Danielle: lastfmlovetweet is down, so I use this method as an perfect alternative. :)
Works awesome! Thanks :)