Frequently asked questions

Q: So how does this work exactly?

A: We fetch your entire Last.fm library and use the tags to determine where each artist you've listened to comes from. This is done by running the artist tags from Last.fm against a list of country names and demonyms. If an artist is tagged with more than one country, the most popular tag is used.

Q: What the heck, France isn't in South America!

A: Actually, French Guiana is in South America and French Guiana is an overseas region of France.

Q: Hey, Artist X isn't from country Y!

A: An artist's associated country is determined by its user-generated tags on last.fm, and these are not always correct. Mistakes will often occur when there are more than one artist with the same name. It's a problem with the data that we can't do anything about.

Q: What happened to the artist images?

A: We miss them too! Last.fm removed all artist images from their API. Send us a message if you know some other way we might get images!

Q: Could you add a new feature or fix a bug?

Sure, probably! Please create an issue on our Github page and we will have a look.

Do you have any other questions or feedback? Send us an email at explr.fm@gmail.com or check out our reddit post.

Accessibility information

Music is universal and should be for everyone! Because of this we have made accessibility a priority for Explr.fm.

We recently updated Explr.fm with full keyboard support. There are two ways to navigate the map with keyboard:

• Search: You can search directly for a country or an artist with the shortcut CTRL + F.

• Keyboard mode: You can pan and zoom the map with the arrows and plus and minus keys. When you zoom in far enough, each visible country is assigned a letter that you can type on the keyboard.

Screen readers

Explr.fm has been tested to work with screen readers VoiceOver for Mac, and NVDA and JAWS for Windows.

List of keyboard commands

CTRL+F

Open search

ESC

Close search or country view

ENTER

Activate search result

↑↓ arrows

Navigate search results, or pan the map north/south

←→ arrows

Pan the map east/west

+

Zoom in

-

Zoom out

L

Read out all visible countries (for screen readers)

Letters B to Z (excluding L and H)

Choose a country

H

Read out help (for screen readers)

A

Toggle auditory feedback

Other accessibility features

Reduced animations

By default, the map is animated when zooming into and out of countries. If you do not want this, you can set a system-level accessibility setting on Mac or Windows to reduce animations.

Did you find an accessibility bug or something that didn't work quite right?

Send an e-mail to Tommy (tommy.feldt@useit.se) and he will be happy to fix it!