Every track you listen to is automatically "scrobbled", you can see your weekly/monthly/yearly top-10 and so on.
To be honest this is the attraction of Last.fm for many people, it records your listening habits on any music client (Amarok, WMP, iTunes, whatever) with simple plugins. It even records listens on iPods whilst on the underground when you connect them up. It's pretty much one of the best cases of rich database collection with a good open API by all accounts.
The Radio feature they are now charging for draws on this information, but the difference is it is now distributing content based upon it. Which when it comes to music, as we all know, is expensive to do legally for many technical and non-technical reasons.
3 Euro is the price of The Times, The NYT or Die Zeit in Athens.
On TFA it notes that scrobbling is still a free service (for the moment). You will still be able to see artists and songs recommended to you; though as you say, the Radio feature (streaming audio) will not work.
Obviously they have made the decision that their revenue from non UK, DE, US users is not large enough to cover bandwidth costs.
It depends what you want, if you want a free indexing service for your habits (ala Facebook) you got it. If you want a high-ish bandwidth content service, well, that costs money.
Slashdot Mirror
Spotify has Last.fm integration.
Every track you listen to is automatically "scrobbled", you can see your weekly/monthly/yearly top-10 and so on.
To be honest this is the attraction of Last.fm for many people, it records your listening habits on any music client (Amarok, WMP, iTunes, whatever) with simple plugins. It even records listens on iPods whilst on the underground when you connect them up. It's pretty much one of the best cases of rich database collection with a good open API by all accounts.
The Radio feature they are now charging for draws on this information, but the difference is it is now distributing content based upon it. Which when it comes to music, as we all know, is expensive to do legally for many technical and non-technical reasons.
3 Euro is the price of The Times, The NYT or Die Zeit in Athens.
On TFA it notes that scrobbling is still a free service (for the moment). You will still be able to see artists and songs recommended to you; though as you say, the Radio feature (streaming audio) will not work. Obviously they have made the decision that their revenue from non UK, DE, US users is not large enough to cover bandwidth costs. It depends what you want, if you want a free indexing service for your habits (ala Facebook) you got it. If you want a high-ish bandwidth content service, well, that costs money.