Last.fm changes its mind over user fees
p2pnet news view P2P | Radio:- CBS-owned Last.fm found itself in a major shit-storm when it announced it was introducing a premium subscription model which meant anyone outside of US, UK or Germany would have to pay to tune in.
Now, calling resulting user outrage “feedback,” the company says it won’t, after all, try to charge some, but only some, users for the privilege of listening.
Only for now, though.
“Last.fm Radio has always been ad supported, which means we sell ads on the site to cover the cost of running the service and paying the music licensing fees,” says Richard Jones in a blog post today, going on »»»
If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes on the site you’ll know that the Last.fm community is international to the extreme – we are made up of people from practically every country in the world. Last.fm is a better place for it.
However, we simply can’t be in every country where our radio service is available selling the ads we need to support the service. The Internet is global, and geographic restrictions seem unfair, but it’s a reality we are faced with every day when managing our music licensing partnerships.
We’re listening and we’ve postponed the date on which radio will become a subscription service outside the USA, UK and Germany. In the meantime we’ll be squeezing in some additional improvements based on your requests:
* Gift subscriptions: you’ll be able to buy a subscription for a friend
* Updating developers using our Radio API: third-party apps that stream Last.fm Radio will have full access to the Radio API, so streaming will work provided the user that logs in is a subscriber. (All other APIs remain free/unchanged)
* Investigating alternative payment options. If Paypal sucks in your country, or you don’t have a credit card, don’t despair. Based on feedback so far, we are looking at supporting pay-by-SMS, and possibly some other options. Can’t promise we’ll have support for everyone’s favourite payment system from day one, but we’ll do our best to make it easy for you.
As soon as Last.fm has, “completed the upgrades noted above, we’ll move ahead with the transition,” promises Jones, adding:
“Thereafter, radio in the USA, UK and Germany will remain ad-supported, and radio in other countries where it’s not feasible to have an ad-supported service will be moving to a subscription service.”
pay to tune in – MP3.com artists – moved to Last.fm, March 27, 2009
blog – Radio Announcement Revisited, March 30, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
March 30th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
And once more, a company makes plans to shaft Canadians.
March 30th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
…once more a company plans it’s demise is more like it. When it goes to a prescription model, those listeners will leave like snow flakes before a spring thaw.
One only has to know where to go and there are literally thousands upon thousands of free internet radio stations that don’t charge a dime. The biggest problem is finding the one that suits your music tastes to the tee.
CBS is under the mistaken impression their service is so unique that the majority of their listeners will pay for the privilege of listening, like satellite stations. Unlike satellite stations, the listeners won’t always be able to take it with them. This will put a dent in just how privileged their listenership thinks they are.
The major labels I am sure are shooting themselves in the foot behind the scenes demanding streaming fees that are unlikely to be realistic compared to the income the ads generate. Greed has been the biggest hold back for the major lack of adoption internet wide on much of streamed music.
March 31st, 2009 at 1:16 am
This is fascinating — a prime example of how corporate “media” slits its own throat at every turn:
1. They try to preemptively kill anything even halfway innovative (Valenti’s VCR drivel, etc.).
2. If they can’t manage to get it banned, they at least try to hobble it severely enough so they can still appear relevant (”region coding” on DVD’s just so they can preserve the archaic custom of having different “release-dates”, and “versions” of stuff in different countries, etc.) There’s no excuse for region-coding in it’s current form.
3. They spend vast amounts of money and time trying to make people believe a limited-term monopoly privilege is a “sacred right”, and buying term-extensions that are then applied retroactively, just so nothing ever enters the dreaded Public Domain ever again, if they can help it.
4. In their frantic, grasping, control-freak greed, they drive people into “piracy” by killing any attempt to get something “legal” going, by making their license-fees prohibitively high. As a result, p2p grows, and their “authorized” attempts at online sales completely fail, because nobody wants to pay for DRM-crippled bullshit, just to play along with an all-but-perpetual monopoly privilege that should have expired already, anyway.
They have just effectively killed Last.fm by this.
Way to go, Big Media — your incessant gouging has just crashed another outfit that tried to play by YOUR rules.