Last.fm and "Various Artists" scrobbles
I've been listening to a bunch of compilation albums the past few months. And a specific album has its metadata configured like this:
albumArtist = Various Artists
albumArtist = VA
Now my Navidrome instance sends this to Last.fm as Various Artists • VA
(It concatenates the fields, instead of overwriting them)
But to my surprise: these tracks were NOT getting scrobbled. Last.fm was rejecting them.
So I did some testing!
The rejection rule
I scrobbled "Around the World" by Daft Punk a few times, each time with different albumArtist values.
And I then read Last.fm's ignoredMessage code. This was the result:
| albumArtist | result | note |
|---|---|---|
Various Artists |
accepted (0) | exact canonical form |
VARIOUS ARTISTS |
accepted (0) | case-insensitive canonical |
Various Artists • VA |
ignored (1) | variant (extra value) |
Various Artists • Foo |
ignored (1) | variant - no "VA" present |
Various Artists, Foo / … ; … / … / … / … & … / … feat. … |
ignored (1) | any separator |
X • Various Artists |
ignored (1) | "Various Artists" anywhere in a multi-value |
The Various Artists / Various Artistsy / Variousartists |
ignored (1) | altered form of the name |
Various |
accepted (0) | not a "Various Artists" variant |
Foo • Bar |
accepted (0) | the bullet itself is harmless |
Foo • VA / VA • Foo / Foo • VA • Bar |
accepted (0) | "VA" alongside others is fine |
AVA / LAVA / DIVA / VANGELIS / AVATAR |
accepted (0) | not "ends with / contains VA" |
VA / va / VA / V/A |
ignored (1) | standalone placeholder blocklist |
Unknown Artist / [unknown] |
ignored (1) | standalone placeholder blocklist |
V.A. / V A / V-A |
accepted (0) | not the blocklisted exact VA |
So it turns out any scrobble where the albumArtist contains but is not exactly Various Artists will get ignored.
The moment you append or prepend anything to Various Artists the scrobble is ignored.
I'm glad I discovered this. I already had over 700 scrobbles ignored because of this. I didn't even know Last.fm cared enough about this
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