Last.fm Not Scrobbling? Here Is How to Fix It

When scrobbling stops, your plays just quietly stop showing up on your profile. There is no error message and no alert, so it is easy to lose a week of listening history before you even notice. The good news is that the cause is almost always a broken connection or a small setting, not a lost account or a deleted profile. Work through the checks below in order, from the quickest to rule out to the most specific, and you will usually have it flowing again in a few minutes.

Check if Last.fm is down first

Before you change anything on your side, rule out a Last.fm outage. If the site itself is having problems, scrobbles can stall or arrive late for everyone, and there is nothing for you to fix. When that happens the best move is to wait it out, because the queued plays usually catch up on their own once service is restored.

It also helps to know that scrobbles can lag by a few minutes even on a normal day. The system batches and processes plays rather than posting them the instant a track ends, so give a new play a moment to appear before you assume it failed. If a track you finished five minutes ago still is not showing after a refresh, then it is worth moving on to the fixes below. A quick status tracker search will tell you whether the delay is on Last.fm's side or yours.

Fixes for Spotify

Spotify uses Last.fm's built-in account connection, which means there is no separate app to babysit. When it breaks, the fix is almost always to refresh that connection:

1. On Last.fm, go to Settings, then Applications.
2. Disconnect Spotify, then Connect it again and re-authorize the link.
3. Confirm you are playing on the same Spotify account you connected.

A password change or a link that has sat idle for a long time is the usual culprit, and reconnecting clears it out cleanly. If you have never linked the two services, or you want the full walkthrough, see our guide on how to connect Last.fm to Spotify.

Fixes for a scrobbler app or extension

If you scrobble Apple Music, YouTube Music, or a desktop player, you are doing it through a separate app or browser extension rather than a native connection. These have a few more moving parts, so check each one:

• Confirm it is signed in to the correct Last.fm account. A quiet sign-out is one of the most common reasons a scrobbler goes silent.
• Check its permissions. Phone scrobblers need notification access to see what is playing. Browser extensions need to be enabled on the specific site you listen on.
• Keep it running. Unlike Spotify's account connection, a scrobbler only works while the app or extension is active, so a closed app means no scrobbles.
• Update it. An outdated scrobbler often breaks after the music app it watches gets its own update.

If your current tool keeps dropping out, it may be worth switching to a more reliable one. We compare the options in our roundup of the best Last.fm scrobblers, and there is a dedicated guide for how to connect Last.fm to Apple Music if that is your setup.

Other common causes

If the connection looks healthy but a specific play still did not register, one of these usually explains it:

• Half-play rule. A track only scrobbles after you have played about half of it. Skipping early means no scrobble, and that is by design rather than a bug.
• Offline listening. Some setups do not scrobble offline plays until you reconnect. Check your scrobbler's offline behavior if your commute listening keeps vanishing.
• Two accounts. Make sure the account you are playing on and the one you check stats on are the same. It is easy to drift between a work login and a personal one.

Confirm it is working again

Once you have made a change, test it properly. Play one full track, let it run past the halfway mark, wait a minute, and then refresh your profile. Seeing that play land is the clearest sign the connection is healthy again. Once scrobbles are flowing, our Last.fm stats viewer lays out your listening from any username so you can see your top artists, tracks, and recent plays all in one clean view, and confirm everything is landing where it should.