Slashdot Mirror
Last.fm To Start Charging International Users
tdobson writes "The popular online radio service Last.fm has announced that users outside of the UK, USA and Germany will need to start paying 3 Euros (about $4.40 USD/£2.80 GBP) per month to continue streaming music on their service. Last.fm doesn't offer much of a reason as to the change, other than writing on their blog that '[t]here will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio.' Already, there appears to be quite a backlash in responses so far, amongst subscribers and non-subscribers of all nationalities — has this killed Last.fm's appeal, globally?"
Pandora Radio is a good one.
Yes, it's a great alternative....
visiting the pandora.com homepage =
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in Australia (your IP address appears to be x.x.x.x). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com
Perhaps advertising simply does not support Last.FM's licensing deals
Yes, it does. One of the comments there, by the same author of the post, says that the revenue from ads in USA, UK and Germany are enough to pay for the bandwidth and licensing fees they have to pay. Everywhere else, it's not enough and that's why they are charging other countries.
Well, not quite. It seems Spotify is available through Europe, but not much outside it (at least, it says it's not available in Australia.)
He was talking about making *better* coffee, which includes grinding beans on a regular basis to ensure you have fresh coffee...
Is deezer available in Australia ?
McCartney fans pay bus tickets. [...] Lennon fans too, with discretion.
I don't pay for the radio I listen to over the air. Why would I pay for it just because it comes from a web site?
Maybe because there aren't any adverts.
That's the reason Last.fm are giving for charging: they have advertising for British, German and American markets, so they don't need to pay. They don't have advertising for users in other countries, so they need to pay.
I use Pandora from Canada practically every day.
The solution is to use Tor, configured to only use US exit nodes, along with FoxyProxy, configured to run www.pandora.com through Tor. Because the audio servers aren't in www.pandora.com and don't do geolocation, as long as you connect to the website from a US host, you can connect to the audio servers directly, thus getting full speed audio.