TL;DR: The growth of ListenBrainz has caught up with us, and our limited team is working on replacing central parts of our infrastructure. In the meantime, many features are unstable.
We are victims of our success. While in the long term this is a good problem to have, the sharp increase in users over the past year and a half has left our infrastructure cracking at the seams.
The good news: Your listens are being stored and imported without issue, even if there are delays. The core service is not compromised and we ask that you please keep submitting your listens. Your stats and playlists will be back!
However, we know that every other week your statistics, weekly playlists, and other features fail to generate for everyone, and cause crashes. We know it is frustrating, and we share that feeling.
While we are aware of the issues, fixing them is far from simple and requires us to completely rework all the crucial parts of our infrastructure.
In the interest of transparency, here are our main issues and what we are doing to fix them:
How many listens?
Our database dumps have become too big for us to process.
We went from 0 to 1 billion listens in 7 years – then to 2.5 billion in the next one and a half years.
Generating and copying our (now huge) database dumps causes crashes as our limited servers run out of memory and disk space.
We are working on improvements, but for each change we need to wait two days to be able to run tests.
In addition, we are moving away from TimescaleDB, a Postgres database extension for time-series data, in favour of vanilla Postgres with a new partition scheme.
We found that TimescaleDB was not adapted for our use case of working with historical imports or deleting listens and users (and all their listens), as well as large gaps between listens, all causing some very slow queries.
Where are my stats, goddammit?
Our statistics and playlist calculation infrastructure, a Spark cluster of 5 servers, is running out of memory and crashing, from one task or another. This used to happen once every few months but is now a weekly occurrence.
This is the issue which is breaking stats, playlists, user similarity, unlinked listens, fresh releases and more.
We are moving to using Clickhouse instead for all statistics calculations, which will free up the Spark cluster to be used for generating playlists and other tasks.
This move is taking some time, as a single person in the team carries the responsibility of rewriting essential code and testing everything carefully.
This will eventually open the door to requesting stats for an arbitrary time range instead of being limited to this and last week/month/year, a hotly requested feature that is not possible with our current system.
The scraping situation
To make matters worse, the entire internet is being bombarded by unscrupulous bad actors (looking at you, AI companies) that don’t follow the rules and try very, very hard to evade any measure meant to limit them.
They rent botnets of millions of residential IPs so they can scrape our APIs and websites incessantly, over and over again, while evading detection, all for data that they could download for free.
They cause surges of 5x the usual traffic across all our projects and slow everything down on our resource-constrained infrastructure.
It also forces us to spend time dealing with these DDOS-like surges instead of working on our other pressing issues.
For ListenBrainz specifically, we have had to disable some features/endpoints that during scraping waves made the website completely unreachable for everybody.
But wait, there’s more…
The loss of our founder in late February was big blow to our team.
Rob was one of the custodians of Listenbrainz infrastructure, but also a central ListenBrainz team member.
We have had to cross-train our ListenBrainz dev team -it is only three of us- to deal with infrastructure and other new aspects, as well as reorganize priorities to deal with the day-to-day operations while the foundation was in the process of hiring a new executive director.
We have been so greatful for the wonderful patience and kindness shown to us by you, our users and community, as we work through these growing pains. Keep submitting listens and let’s grow together!
– your ListenBrainz Team
Kudos for all the great job you’ve done, I’m sure things will get back to normal soon.
Thank you for the update and all the great work behind Listenbrainz, looking forward for these migrations to be completed !
The grow from 50k to 150 users just in one year is impressing! My congrats and thanks to the whole team for your hard work!
Thanks for the detailed update and for being transparent about what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s reassuring to know that listens are still being stored safely. Hopefully these growing pains lead to a much more robust ListenBrainz
I joined during April 26. Sorry guys -.-;
😡
Whoops, me too. Sorry!
Much <3 to the LB team!! We got this!
Edit: Oh, this is quite a good opportunity to plug Alistral, a pretty sweet tool made by a community member. It will generate stats etc for your account, even if the LB servers haven't run them, as long as you keep submitting listens. It is a command line application (scary) but it has instructions for newbies: https://rustynova016.github.io/Alistral/
I looked at the usage stats, and see that the sharp increase seems to have started in May 2025… I wonder what led to it… Was there a trending article or post?
Good question! Nothing that I could find with a quick search, or can remember. We had some big updates to last.fm importing/syncing (and that took off) a bit earlier. If anyone sleuths out anything in particular, or a team member remembers something that would have made things jump up, please share! It’s possible we just hit a critical mass of users and momentum, after a lot of building up in various areas/audiences.
FWIW I started focusing more on homelabbing, including moving my music offline and scrobbling, after a blog post made the rounds in some self hosting communities along the lines of “How I ditched Spotify” or something to that effect. I can’t remember when I spotted it but that sounds roughly around when.
I think I know what your talking about, this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d2cATPt8Nk
A bit late to reply here, but I believe this is around the time last.fm hid the comments on artist pages. That’s honestly why I made an account here around that time. I figured if they’re trying to rid of the social aspects might as well come over here since the layout looks nicer.
i believe in you 🩷🥹 everything will be okay, i just know that
Thanks for the update and honesty. It’s great to see the service growing. The current issues are a temporary blip that will fade from memory soon enough. Keep up the good work.
Thanks guys for your work 🤗
Amazing job… and totally understandable!
For sure this is a sign the open ecosystem is indeed thriving.
Hope we can see great things ahead, if not, please roadmap for them!
Cheers!
Dalboz
A big thank you to the team! Please, don’t overwork yourself working on the new infrastructure.
I don’t want to sound negative, but do you have an idea of the proportions of new users who are bots instead of humans? I have a hard time believing that the sharp increase in the number of users can be entirely attributed to the growing popularity of ListenBrainz.
Thanks for the update! I’m glad to see the service is growing, and always glad to hear about the devs behind the service. I love ListenBrainz, so thank you so much for all your work on it 🙂
If all else fails with AI scraping waves, maybe you guys can implement anubis or something similar?
Thank you guys for the update and all the hard work. ❤️
I had imagined you guys were just in a rough patch, I just hope you all get to enjoy the sun despite all the hardships, thanks for all your work. ❤️
Well my listens are definitely lost since you’ve blocked my Linode’s IP… alas.