Release: lastfm-mcp v2.9.0 — Recommendations that explain each pick

Ask your assistant what to listen to and it now looks past the artists you already play, explains each pick, and suggests an album and tracks to start with when Last.fm has them. Every tool is also marked read-only, and lastfm-mcp.com has a new page written for people who aren’t developers.

Breaking changes

• get_music_recommendations takes a whole-number limit from 1 to 15, with 8 as the default. It used to accept up to 50 but never showed more than eight artists, so a call with a limit above 15 now fails.
• The music_discovery prompt no longer takes a username. It recommends for the account you signed in with; for someone else’s account, call get_music_recommendations with their username.
• The manual /login page is gone, and ?session_id= links no longer sign you in. If your setup used them, reconnect through an app that handles the sign-in itself, such as Claude, ChatGPT or Claude Code.

What’s new

• Recommendations leave out your top 1,000 artists of all time and the artists leading your weekly, monthly and yearly charts. Each pick says how it connects to your listening, such as “Similar to Boards of Canada (#6 this week)”, or where it sits on a genre’s chart.
• Each pick comes with a starter album and up to two tracks when Last.fm has them.
• genre keeps picks to a Last.fm tag, such as shoegaze. A tag Last.fm doesn’t know gets a plain message.
• Each set of picks ends with a suggested follow-up call for different ones. It carries the latest 50 artists you’ve been shown, so older picks can come back after that.
• Picks weigh your recent listening more heavily than your all-time charts, and they’re cached for an hour (it used to be a day).
• Every tool has a display title and a read-only hint, so apps can tell it only reads your data. Whether an app still asks before each call depends on the app and its settings.
• lastfm-mcp.com now starts with example questions and four setup steps for the Claude app, and links to it show a branded preview image. Coding agents can read setup steps from lastfm-mcp.com/llms.txt.

Fixes

• The genre option on recommendations was ignored. It now filters the picks.
• Seven lookup tools, among them get_artist_info and get_similar_artists, said they worked without signing in. Every tool needs sign-in, and the descriptions now say so.
• The server’s icon in apps and directories was Last.fm’s logo. It’s now the server’s own icon.

Under the hood

• A recommendation has a budget of 40 Last.fm requests (retries included) and 8 seconds. A rate limit from Last.fm stops further requests, and you get whatever picks were found by then. A first call on staging took 32 requests and 4.9 seconds.
• Each tool call now records an anonymous event for a private usage dashboard: the tool, the app, whether it worked, cache use, timing and how many Last.fm requests it made. It holds no username and nothing you sent to the tool; the privacy policy lists what’s kept.
• A server.json for the official MCP Registry, and a per-IP limit on app registrations.
• The main test suite has 630 passing tests, up from 299, and the new usage dashboard has its own 184.