Big news. Last.fm gets full track listening capabilities.
As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.
Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.
Interestingly you can play each track 3 times, then you get an alert about their forthcoming ‘subscription service’. But I think that sounds pretty fair. If I want to listen to something on-demand, more than 3 times, I think it’s about time I started to make some commitment to it.
The more you play stuff the more the artist gets paid. That sounds pretty fair to me too.
Nice one chaps. Good luck with it.
That is big news, great for last.fm (if someone can explain to me just why I feel it’s important to record all of my music listening for posterity…. I love it, but don’t know why?!?!?)…
….and finally the music industry is beginning to realise that ‘try before you buy’ might be a better idea than suing everyone that downloads one-by-one. There’s not a lot of other industries where if you’re dissatisfied with the product you can’t take it back and get your money back.
It’s taken them a while to get there though; when the whole Napster thing was going on, the heads of all the major labels sat down with Napster with a view to making it legal like this…
…of course they didn’t, and presumed they could sue and close it down instead, and thus sending all the Napster users to dozens of Napster imitators.
Interesting that they couldn’t come to a similar arrangement with Pandora though… though perhaps that’s part of the deal…