Published on
March 25, 2009 in
music and tech.
“The Social Media Guide” points to a new Last.fm blog post that discusses their new charge for “International” users to access their streaming radio service.
In order to keep providing the best radio service on the web, we need to ask our listeners from countries other than USA, UK and Germany to subscribe for €3.00 per month. In return you’ll get unlimited access to Last.fm Radio, and a promise that we’ll be hard at work improving the service for years to come.
This isn’t a huge surprise considering the ridiculous royalties charged to Internet radio providers. As Mashable points out, Last.fm competitor Pandora simply cutoff International users. While I think that people generally overreact to a company charging for something it once gave away, I fear this is the nature of the beast when it comes to dealing with music copyright holders. The thing with Last.fm is that they offer so many other ways to discover music that are beyond simple streaming.
Published on
March 11, 2009 in
music and tech.
CNET announced last week that today it will begin redirecting requests for its music.download.com site to Last.fm. It’s a logical step since they are both CBS Interactive properties and music is what Last.fm is all about. Still, I imagine that there are a lot of music.download.com users will find it a hard transition given the different concepts behind the two sites.
I really like Last.fm and think that they bring a really interesting approach to music discovery. Since more users means more data means better discovery, I hope that this added exposure increases their userbase.
I’m a little late on this, but last week the folks at London-based Last.fm announced that they had been acquired by CBS. Most “social networking” sites don’t really appeal to me, but Last.fm hits me in my soft spot: music + cool tech + obsessive data collection & reporting.
Last.fm is all based around “scrobbling” the songs you play in iTunes, on your iPod, or however you listen to digital music. Scrobbling reports song plays to a Web server. Last.fm was born out of AudioScobbler, but where Last.fm takes off is in connection of it’s users based on play history. They’ve branched out recently to provide nice Flash-based playlists (see right column) and player. Anyway, their approach to social networking is especially cool.
Anyway, with CBS acquiring Last.fm, it will be interesting to see what direction they go. Congrats to the Last.fm team.
