Last.fm To Start Charging International Users For Certain Services
South Africans and other international users will soon be required to pay a monthly subscription fee to listen to the last.fm radio service
According to the Last.HQ blog:
“In all other countries [not USA, UK or Germany], listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month. There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.
Since we streamed our first track from Last.fm back in 2002, we have focused on playing the right songs to the right people, compensating artists for playing their music, and being the best music site on the web. We appreciate the support we get from the 30 million people who use Last.fm every month—double the number of people since this time last year. We work with over 280,000 labels and artists, many of whom we pay directly, and have built up the largest catalogue of any web radio platform: over 7 million tracks are available on Last.fm Radio stations.
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.”
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While I was initially disappointed to hear this, in retrospect, it is probably not such a bad thing.
Considering that most South Africans use only the basic services offered by last.fm (ie. scrobbling, groups etc.), it probably won’t affect too many people. However, if you do use the radio service, you will run into difficulties.
For those of you who have used the Last.fm radio service, you would know how brilliant it is and how it is an epic way to find new music. Considering that radio stations all over the world have to pay monumental royalty fees; a mere 3 euros a month seems to be a pretty reasonable subscription fee for a radio service which is actually worth listening to.
I have been a great fan of Last.fm for years. I browse through artist pages and checkout what my friends are listening to at least once a day. I have found so much new music on last.fm and really enjoy my browsing experience. So, a cost of 3 euros a month, so that they can cover all the royalty costs of me listening to their radio? Seems well worth it.
What do you think?
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Interesting article
Thanks man
And thanks for referring it to me.
I must say, I don’t think that it will affect that many South Africans.
Even though it wont affect most South African users, why is it that only other countries need to pay for these services? Does our bandwidth usage cost them more? Why cant the other countries such as the US / Germany / UK help pay for these fees and services? It is not explained what makes these countries exempt besides the obvious angle of the amount of users who would be affected by this policy.
It wouldnt be half as bad if this was applied across the board instead of making some countries pay and others not, where is the logic / fairness in doing that? The problem is not so much in whether or not the money is worth it or well spent (because it definately is), the problem is the lack of consistency in applying these terms. I have been a loyal Last.fm user for a long time now as well and, to be honest, being selective over who pays and who doesnt seems like a bit of a slap in the face. What it looks like to me is that they need more funding but are too scared to force their bigger user bases to pay at the risk of losing them.
Matthew,
You touch on such a valid point there.
I couldn’t agree more. This is definitely a form of selective implementation which is going to really annoy a lot of people. While it does seem that Last.fm may be too scared to implement this cost in their bigger user base, i’m hoping that it has more to do with differential royalty costs.
Maybe, the royalty costs associated with international listeners is far greater than the royalty costs associated with local listeners. Maybe record labels stipulate differential costs depending on which country one is based in. Unfortunately, I have no idea how royalties work, but I guess this differential cost implementation would then make sense.
Nonetheless, they should have given their users a proper reason for this, and explained why some countries have to pay and others don’t. I mean, as you rightly point out, perhaps the overall costs would be far lesser than 3 euros a month if everyone had to chip in.
Come on Last.fm! let’s get some proper reasons.
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