Because it still does exactly what I want it to do, and what I've wanted it to do since I signed up in 2004, which is keep logs of every song that I listen to. The user-generated content side of it was added after I signed up (I think?) so I don't see how I could really miss it.
You might be interested in https://libre.fm/ if you aren't confident about the future of Last.fm. It can be used as a drop-in replacement to track your music plays.
I'm annoyed that I didn't keep using it consistently. I even had it tracking usage from an offline iRiver H340 MP3 player - at the end of the day, I'd upload a database from Rockbox.
Oh you must have left awhile ago then. I agree they ruined the best music discovery service on the web, but even without it the site was dated but functional.. until last year.
Last year CBS decided the whippersnappers needed a redesign and took out around 80% of the features and put the site into a perpetual beta state.
Didn't really give up until they had the fabulous idea to replace direct streaming with playing poor match Youtube videos as radio. That killed radio finally and made a none functioning joke of the main reason I bought my network music player.
Was mad about that as Last radio was my first choice for work listening.
The site was dated as they were frozen in 2008 - After CBS bought them there was one update very soon after then the site didn't change at all until last year. Minor updates and bug fixes only.
As for the update last year, pretty and vacant, doesn't bring back the things I loved about the site, but lets me see lots of pretty graphs of things I'm not interested in. I took a look at libre fm after that, but that's even more abandoned.
It's tragic how corporate greed can kill such an awesome site. They wasn't even ashamed to ask for money in countries where they didn't had adverts while they were removing the features from its users.
Soundcloud launched in 2008. Spotify launched in 2008. Only a year or so after Facebook opened signups to anyone IIRC. Not exactly sure what the impact on Last.fm would have been but it evidently wasn't good.
You can get even better idea of their site growth (or lack thereof) from the above link (scroll to the bottom of the page) http://www.leakedsource.com/blog/lastfm
0. rough heuristic: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=last.fm
Edit: If anyone wants to add me on last.fm here is my profile! http://www.last.fm/user/joer14