Last.FM To Require Subscription For Mobiles and Home Devices

Hummdis writes "If you, like so many others, listen to Last.FM on your mobile or home entertainment devices, then you're going to need to pay for this once-free service effective February 15th. It remains free to listen on the Last.FM website, Xbox Live, Windows Mobile 7 phones and the desktop app, but if you want to continue to listen on Android, your Blu-ray player, or any other device, you'll need to spend the $3.00 per month to be able to do so."

Comments

Pandora it is then

[Anonymous Coward]

Good call, dopes..

Ok, Next

[bobjr94]

Shoutcast has thousands of streams, Pandora , Maestro.fm, if you have satellite radio you can listen for free online, there are hundreds of sites on Itunes radio, etc...Shouldnt be much of a problem to ditch them.

Re:Ok, Next

[Mike Buddha]

if you have satellite radio you can listen for free online

Not on SiriusXM. $3 a month for internet or mobile access.

Bleh.

[Aeternitas827]

Only reason I had the Last.fm app on my phone was because I could listen without either a) having to pay or b) getting stuck with a skip limit; though, to be honest, I haven't used it much as of late, being that I can get an actual decent radio station stream via TuneIn. Still sad to see it go this way though.

So How Do They Know?

[Nom du Keyboard]

So how do they know if you're on Android listing through your browser? Change the ID string to Internet Explorer (or Firefox if you can't stomach Microsoft anything) and keep on listening.

Re:So How Do They Know?

[tlhIngan]

So how do they know if you're on Android listing through your browser? Change the ID string to Internet Explorer (or Firefox if you can't stomach Microsoft anything) and keep on listening.

I'm guessing if you're doing it that way it's fine, but if you're using the Last.FM app itself, then you'll have to pay. If you leave it at default it'll just take you to the appropriate place to download the app. If you fake the browser ID you get the desktop page which can take forever to render and the flash thing can be as slow as anything (and thusly drain your battery faster).

Re:So How Do They Know?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to access a page? Rhythmbox has last.fm support built-in and it doesn't render html at all.

Non-US alterantives

[IDK]

Last.FM died for me when Canadians needed to start paying while Americans didn't.

That was also the case for europeans. Are there any alterantives to this for us non-us folks?

Re:Non-US alterantives

[bhcompy]

Slacker radio is one of the best as far as I'm concerned.

Personally, SomaFM is what I use for streaming, as it suits my needs for music that can play in the background while coding/gaming/whatevering. I only listen to actual music on the road, and I don't stream that.

Re:Non-US alterantives

[I8TheWorm]

Pandora moved to an hour cap per month right around the time I was at the Blackberry developer conference and met one of the Slacker devs. I checked it out and loved it.

Since then I've tried other services but continue to use Slacker. They seem to get what people want.. .free service with commercials or paid service.

The only downside is I can't find Trailer Park Troubadours or Sisters Morales (two bands I played with) on Slacker while I could on Pandora... but in due time I'm sure.

Re:Non-US alterantives

[clang_jangle]

I subscribe to both, last.fm and soma. At three dollars a month each, they're a fantastic bargain. With last you have to invest some time and energy into personalizing it, but in my experience it's well worth it. Just the other day I was thinking to myself, "never have I had access to so much good programming for so little money".

Re:Non-US alterantives

[sortius_nod]

But I don't live in the US...

That clucking and flapping sound ...

[c0d3g33k]

... that's the chickens coming home to roost.

All you folks who ditched the eeeevil "traditional" services that wanted payment because stuff on the internet was free: this is your wake-up call. Now that you've had a taste of their wares, it's time to pay up if you want the good stuff.

It wasn't going to be free forever, so you need to start thinking about which businesses you want to support, because the big media conglomerates are about to roll over the web like the juggernauts they are.

Re:That clucking and flapping sound ...

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Or we'll just wait for some other small startup company to come along and broadcast free radio over the net again. We'll switch to that until they get big and start charging, and then it's on to the next service. Welcome to the web. Things move fast here Sweetheart. ;)

Quality is the issue for me

[Lyrata]

I've used Last.fm for a long time, but on my Android phone (Droid 1) the quality is mediocre at best and cuts out on occasion. I won't be paying for this.

Re:Interesting.

[artor3]

Probably the same price they're asking - $3 per month per user.

So about $300.

Not relevant because of grooveshark

[uigrad_2000]

Last.fm is hardly relevant today, because of grooveshark.

Grooveshark is like last.fm, except that you can play any list of songs you want in any order that you want, and you can rewind/fast forward as you wish. Oh, and it lets you play music all day long (there is no limit to number of minutes you can be connected).

I'm surprised that the RIAA hasn't come down like a ton of bricks on Grooveshark yet. It is different from limewire and napster-classic in just two ways:

• The music you stream cannot easily be downloaded for storage for offline play.
• Anything that looks like Pink Floyd is removed. That's the only band that Grooveshark admins fear.

Re:Not relevant because of grooveshark

[Rennt]

I thought I'd check out your recommendation. Unfortunately, according to the android market at least, grooveshark requires $9 month for a "Groovshark Anywhere" subscription if you want to use it from your mobile, although it does have a free trial of unspecified length.

Re:Not relevant because of grooveshark

[HazE_nMe]

If you want to use Grooveshark from your Android device without paying for a Grooveshark Anywhere account just get TinyShark from the market. It looks like it just streams through HTTP and Grooveshark doesn't know you are listening on a mobile device.

Re:Enough!

[c0d3g33k]

sheesh. Wanting compensation for your efforts does not imply the devil is involved. Get a grip.

Wonder who's sponsoring this...

[lowlymarine]

Free on the desktop, XBox Live, and Windows Phone 7, eh? Gee, how inconspicuous. But seriously, with all the stuttering the Android app was worthless unless you were ONLY listening to Last.FM and not trying to actually use your multitasking anyways; if I had to guess, they didn't give the audio stream the right level of priority. Since no other media player had those kind of problems, I wasn't sure whether it was merely incompetence or an attempt to drive people away from using the radio on their phones. I guess now we know?

Google Listen?

[iONiUM]

There's always Google Listen. It's not live streaming, but it has a large library of "casts" (should I really use the word "pod" for non-iOS centric speech?) available for your to peruse. Just sayin'..

Re:Fair Enough

[alostpacket]

Someone linked to this from the Ars article on the subject, seems quite relevant: How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

Licensing

[JBMcB]

Because of draconian content distribution licensing schemes. Buying a license to stream over the internet is probably per-device, so computers require once license to distribute, handhelds/phones need another license fee, set-top boxes need another fee...

I used to work for a radio company and we ran into the same problems. Some content we paid for could be put over the airwaves and over the streaming internet station, some of it could only be put over the air, depending on the licensing. The company even got into trouble for having a pause button on the player, as that constituted downloading internet content which fell under a separate license than internet "streaming."

Re:Licensing

[westlake]

Because of draconian content distribution licensing schemes. Buying a license to stream over the internet is probably per-device, so computers require once license to distribute, handhelds/phones need another license fee, set-top boxes need another fee...

That doesn't seem to be correct.

The rates seem to be based on the kind of service you provide and the amount of content you stream.

You'll pay more if you honor specific requests - streaming tiles from a catalog like Rhapsody's. Less if you look more like a radio station - building playlists around user-defined artists or themes. Licensing 101

There does seem to be an "enterprise cap."

The license will be a more or less a fixed and managable expense for something the size of Last.fm or Pandora.

But distribution costs and the general user experience will differ. The Berlin Philharmonic streams its concerts as a commercial free HD video subscription service with audio quality as high as 320 AAC.

You get what you are willing pay for.

Re:Died when they dropped Canada

[kent_eh]

Ahh... I was wondering why this was news..
Apparently it's not news or stuff that matters until it affects the USA.

Not that it affected me much, I just tossed my MP3 player back on the charger and carried on.

What, people use it to stream lo-quality music?

[TheoGB]

I've only ever really used it as it was intended, as a scrobbling device for massive muso-geeks. Basically it's all about showing how fucking cool your music taste is.

http://last.fm/user/TheoGB

Read it and weep, crap music fans.

Re:Died when they dropped Canada

[cayenne8]

Actually it is. If you go to slashdot.org/faq and look under the editorial section you'll see:

"Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?

Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it. "