This has been bugging me for awhile.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Most of the time I give them a once-through and then immediately delete them. Podcasts are a source of information for me, like reading nytimes.com. I don’t consider them part of my music library. When I review my last.fm profile, I don’t want to see Bloomberg News up there in the top ten all time next to Radiohead, U2 and Neko Case. Last.fm is about keeping track of my music profile, not my podcast listening (for me at least).

Every six or seven months I’ve gone in and deleted podcasts from my library in order to make my total play count and artists charts more reflective of the information I’m actually trying to track. Recently I figured out how to avoid scrobbling these tracks all together. The mythical holy grail of permanently banning specific artists, if you will.

I use the last.fm scrobbler desktop application for Mac OS X. It starts automatically whenever iTunes is open and also tracks my iPod plays. Here’s how to modify the preferences so that the last.fm app only scrobbles the tracks you want to track. (I’m not saying that this is the how you can tell last.fm not to track all of your N*Sync plays, but you know…however you want to use this information is entirely up to you. Weirdo.)

Permanently Unscrobble Specific Artists

• With the last.fm application open, click on the last.fm menu and select “preferences.”
• In the preferences window click on the “Scrobbling” submenu in the left hand window.
• In the window that says “Only tracks from the selected directories will be scrobbled,” double click on the hard drive icon and navigate to wherever you store your music. (All of my music is under my user account in the Music folder).
• Now, click off the check mark buttons next to all of the artists that you do not want to scrobble. As you can see in the image below, I’ve turned off all of my podcasts:

How to know if you’ve done it right

When you play a track in a non-scrobbling directory the notation in the scrobbling status bar will indicate that it will not be uploaded to your last.fm profile:

Notes

• The same technique can be used (I would assume) for individual albums, but as far as I can tell, you can not drill down to specific tracks. It only works based on directories. If for some reason you desperately don’t want the world to know that you secretly rock out to Abba’s “Dancing Queen” behind those inauspicious headphones, you could always change the album title in the track information to something like “ban” and then Consolidate Library in the iTunes preference window. The file structure will reorganize itself with “ban” as a new album under the “Abba” directory with “Dancing Queen” as the only file in the folder. Uncheck “ban” and you won’t scrobble any of the tracks included.